In today’s Tech News Tuesday episode, we’re talking about creating your social media mix—and it’s not just about posting, it’s about making those posts consistently count. Your social media posts should be a part of your overall strategy. Too many people treat each platform as a silo, and don’t have a plan for posting.
Identify Your Core Messages and Audience Concerns
Focus on the business you want and create content from the perspective of your ideal client. That holds true not only for your website, but also your email marketing, social media and ads. Having an integrated approach saves you time and gets you better results.
Focus on the business you want and create content from the perspective of your ideal client.
From a priority perspective, make sure you’ve identified your core messages and audience concerns and that your website addresses these, and that you have a process in place for nurturing that audience with email marketing.
Social media is then a great place to get new people to discover you, and you can direct them back to your website and invite them to your email list. But social media is called social for a reason, and you can’t just post offer, offer, offer or people will tune you out.
Follow the 80/20 Rule
A good rule of thumb for social media is to use the 80/20 rule – 80% interesting, informative, educational or entertaining content, and 20% promotion. We often see the extremes – a great fun social media channel with lots of followers, but that never makes an offer so doesn’t result in new business, or only posting offers so there is no traction or engagement.
80% interesting, informative, educational, or entertaining and 20% promotion.
Ingredients for Your Social Mix
Core Strategic Content
So what’s included in a social mix? A simple approach is to figure out how often you will post, and that will give you an idea of how many posts per month. For example if you post three times a week on Instagram, you need 12-15 posts per month. Of course you start with your core strategic content – the key concerns of your audience and how you solve those.
Repeating Features
So what else is in our mix? We like the idea of repeating features, your audience starts to expect them and you can save time creating them in batches and with templates. Great examples of repeating features are customer case studies or testimonials, before/after posts for a project, or a featured product or project, and, of course, our Tech News Tuesday!
Highlight the Human Side of Your Business
You can also do a behind the scenes, featured product or employee spotlight. All of these show a little bit more of the human side of your business which is great for your audience getting to know you more. These can be weekly or monthly repeating features depending on how many posts you need per month.
Seasonal Items and Events
Other things to add into the social mix are seasonal items related to your business, whether that is events you do, back to school, or tax time. Most businesses have some sort of annual rhythm.
Fill in With Some Fun Stuff
And of course you can fill in with holidays and some of those fun National Day holidays, like Take your Dog to Work day, where you show off your pets. There are free resources out there like the National Day Calendar where you can get other ideas.
Getting your social mix on a calendar and in your plan is key to getting it done, batching content creation and automated scheduling to save time.
If you’re still struggling with what you should post, here’s a free resource for you:
Being consistent in all your marketing efforts is the key to getting traction, and social media is no exception. Consistency gets results.
Do you prefer to listen in? Here’s our podcast:
Links in this episode: What Are Your Customers Really Doing On Social Media?
