Staying On Brand With Your Team

 If you're running your business' social media and have employees who post about your product or service (to your business account, or their personal account), there are some guidelines they should follow.

Remember, it's your brand. And if you've spent the time defining your target audience, style and aesthetic, it will be important to have a style guide that they can follow.

Keep in mind, this is a great way to get your product & service in front of more eyes, and these are people that you normally would not have as an audience, so 👍🏼👍🏼

Here are some tips to staying on brand:

✅ If they're using any logos, make sure they are approved and the same across all of your platforms.

✅ Kindly ask that they tag you in both the caption AND the image.

✅ Request that they stick to your color scheme and use the same fonts.

Questions about branding? Ask me in the comments!

Planning your Content for 2020

We are two weeks out from a New Year and a NEW DECADE! Are you tired of hearing about that yet? 😂 But silliness aside, I’ve been working the last couple of months to get all my ducks in a row so I can start the New Year organized and on point. I’ve been organizing my business files and processes to help make my customer on-boarding and workflows better. I’ve also been thinking about how to help my clients and followers to organize themselves and their content for an easier work/life balance. Check out the video below with tips to make creating & sharing content easier and what you need to do to get your content in front of more eyes. And Happy Holidays!

Common Social Media Insight Terms & What They Mean

It’s all fun and games on social media until you get serious, and then it can get confusing, #amiright? If you want to take your social media to the next level, there are a few insights to look at that will help you set your course for better engagement, and hopefully a better return. I made this infographic with the 4 most basic social media terms, let’s go over them, as well as a few others that should be on your radar.

Reach

This is the number of times an account has seen your post, even if they’ve seen it multiple times. What this means is that if someone saw your post and then maybe came back to it later to read it again, the visit is only counted as one visit. This is an important metric for calculating and understanding how large your audience is. 

Impressions

This metric measures how many times your post has been shown in a users’ feed. So if that same person saw your post and then came back to it later, it’s counted as another visit (impression). Because of this reason, Impressions are usually higher than reach. 

Engagement

Engagement tells you how much people are interacting with your post (likes, comments, shares). It’s the number of people who engaged with your post / number of people who saw your post X 100. A higher engagement rate is a good thing and means people are reacting to your post and content. 

Audience

Your audience is the group of people you’re trying to reach on social media. This includes your followers and anyone else who sees and/or interacts with your posts on their feed. Growing your audience is one of the best ways to promote brand awareness.

Analytics

Analytics is the combination of data found in your social media metrics that helps you interpret how your content is performing. You can use this information to discover patterns of what is working for your brand, and what isn’t, and then using that information to improve your content strategy. 

Cross-Channel

In social media, each platform (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) is a channel. A cross-channel strategy is using your social media posts across each platform that your brand is active on.

Direct Message

A direct message is a private message that can be sent to your inbox on a social media platform. These are not comments that are left on posts, which are private but are sent directly to users. On Instagram, you can also share posts via direct message to people, and this is actually considered a good form of engagement for that post!

Disappearing Content

This refers to content that expires after a certain amount of time, usually 24 hours. This is something that is seen on Instagram Stories or Snapchat. The only time story content does not disappear on Instagram is when it is added to a highlight in the user’s profile. Disappearing content can be useful for covering events when you want to post some ongoing content to share but don’t want to overwhelm your audiences’ feed.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen Content is content that stands the test of time and is great for repurposing and reusing on social media. It’s important to have a balance of evergreen content and more specialized content for feed diversity. As an example, this post will still be relevant a year from now, but how the Instagram algorithm works will likely change.

Hashtag

A hashtag is a word or group of words strung together with no space, and the # in front of it. It’s basically the way to search a subject or group on social media, and also links your content to other posts on the same subject or topic. Using hashtags is the way to get your content in front of other audiences that are not your followers 

Platform

A platform is a social media channel or network. 

Traffic

No, I am not referring to the 405! 😂 Traffic is the number of people, or users, who visit a website or page on social media. If you’re managing a social media channel or platform, your goal is to drive traffic to that page and you do this by targeting your audience. 

User-Generated Content (UGC)

This is the term that refers to using content other than your own in a social media post. If you’re working with a brand, or using a brand’s product, using their content on your own feed is a form of promoting that brand. Brands also use content posted by their users in the brand’s feeds, and this can be a great way to drive traffic to a smaller brand. It’s very important to make sure you credit the original poster, however. 

Vanity Metric

A vanity metric is a metric that looks like a large indicator of performance but actually means nothing. An example of this having a large follower count but a low engagement rate. Many times this is the result of using bots or third-party apps to grow a following to make it look like your account is popular, when in fact it is not. You can discover this by checking the posts; if an account has 10,000 followers but only 50 likes per post, there is a good chance the followers aren’t authentic. 

Viral

A post that goes viral is one that is very popular and is shared, or liked, many times. Viral content is golden chalice of social media. 

There are many more social media terms but these are the most basic and what you need to know to understand the analytics in your account. By the way, analytics are only available on Instagram for a business account. 

Researching & Using Hashtags

Let’s talk about hashtags! #️⃣ Are you being intentional with your hashtag strategy? This is the best & easiest way to increase your reach on Instagram & get your posts seen. But how do you know the right ones to use? Research! Full stop here: Don’t just slap a bunch of hashtags in your caption and call it a day. You can use up to 30 hashtags per post, so use them wisely.

I spend considerable time researching hashtags for the best performance. It’s easy but soooo time-consuming! Using a spreadsheet for each client, and a sheet for each batch of hashtags, I can easily find out what is performing, or not.

Here’s how I do it: that’s one of the spreadsheets that I use - in this case, I’m sharing @skyeretriever account.
There are 3 columns - hashtag, position, and notes. I list the hashtag, and then search on Instagram for its’ position, which is the number of posts attributed to that hashtag; too low and it’s too narrow & not getting noticed. Likewise, too high (over 1,000,000) and it’s likely getting lost in the feed quickly.

This is also a great way to find new hashtags to use, related hashtags will appear at the top of the hashtag you are viewing. Be sure to click on those hashtags, if they’re relevant, and see what their position is before you add them.

Sort the hashtags by position so you can see where they fall in popularity & if you want to continue using them. Highlighted hashtags are usually new ones that I test, and there are always tags that get retired because they’re too popular.

By the way, this is an ongoing process! You just don’t do the research and call it done. This is something that has to be done every few weeks or at least once a month. As I said, it’s time-consuming!

This brings me to another point: are hashtags relevant on Facebook? Not so much. Hashtag use on Facebook could be detrimental to your brand. A study by BuzzSumo determined that tagged posts performed worse than untagged posts. I know, mind blown.

People don’t use the search bar on Facebook the same way they use it on Instagram. This doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t use them. They can be used successfully to promote an event or a campaign, and a branded hashtag may turn up in a Google search. If you’re going to use hashtags on Facebook though, I would recommend only using one or two and not populating your post with a slew of hashtags, it takes away from the message.