How to boost your site's visibility through social media – Inbound 15
Social media is a powerful tool in several respects. It can extend your visibility and brand awareness, increase sales, and combine perfectly with other communications and marketing methods.
Above all, social media allows you to give visibility to the content you create as part of an educational communications strategy (or inbound marketing). If this type of strategy can bring you a great deal, incorporating social media into it will add even more value. In fact, it is almost essential. It is often said that you should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% promoting it.
To put things in context: implementing an educational communications strategy has led you to produce content (white papers, blog articles, etc.) tailored to your target audience. From there, you have designed a complete journey that your web visitors will follow in order to become clients.
We now enter the next phase, in which you need to give visibility to this content.
1. Choosing the right social networks
Being present on all social networks, or as many as possible, is counterproductive. If you have a dedicated communications team, it may be feasible. But every network requires time and a strategy. You will not be able to be everywhere. And more than that, some networks will not be suited to your target audience or your brand.
Generally speaking, Facebook lends itself to B2C activities, LinkedIn to B2B, and Twitter to both. This is not an absolute rule, but it can give a few broad indicators. For example, the HR sector can be just as well suited to a LinkedIn page as to a Facebook page.
For "visual" networks (Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube), think above all about the content you could offer there. If you have no defined strategy, or no capacity to regularly feed your accounts with video or photo content, you may prefer not to dive into that adventure just yet.
Similarly, while managing any social network takes time, some are more time-consuming than others. Twitter is a case in point, where messages have a shorter lifespan than on Facebook. Whereas the general advice for Facebook is to post once a day, the recommendation for Twitter is around five times a day (these figures are indicative, since the recommended posting frequency will vary depending on the target audience, the sector, etc.).
A good approach would be to start with a single network — one that matches your core target audience (or Buyer Persona), your resources, and your objectives. Once your community is well established, you can always think about expanding to other networks.
2. Defining your strategy and planning your messages
This step is in fact parallel to the previous point. When you choose the social network or networks for your brand, you must think in terms of strategy.
What tone should you adopt on your page? What type of content should you highlight (in addition to your site's content, such as white papers or blog articles)? What resources do you have available (particularly in terms of time)?
If you know in advance that you can only devote limited time to managing your social networks, you may prefer to avoid opening a Twitter account. A Facebook page will prove simpler and better suited to sharing your blog articles once or twice a week.
Beyond the chosen strategy, planning your content and its reposts three months ahead — ideally — can be a great help. You will know in advance what topics you will cover and can even schedule certain reposts on your social networks ahead of time.
3. Optimising presentation
Once you have chosen your networks, defined your strategy, and created your content, you will need to share it on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or other pages.
At this stage, presentation is of great importance. Adding a visual when you post on a social network is essential: it is the visual that will catch the eye first. It is said that a post with a visual doubles — or more — its impact.
From there, bear a second best practice in mind: a post with a visual is good; a post with a good visual is better. You should therefore avoid pixelated photos, blurry videos, and so on.
This aspect should be considered from the moment you create your blog articles: most social networks generate a preview of links posted on them. This preview is automatic and is based on the main image of your article. Make sure this image has the correct dimensions so it is not cropped. As a general rule, aim for a rectangular image 900 pixels wide and 500 pixels tall (this way the image will be large enough for your article and well-suited to displaying well on social networks). This is, in fact, the size of the header image for this very article.
Finally, in addition to a good visual presentation, prepare a concise introductory message for each post. Users are exposed to a great deal of information on social networks; the longer a message, the less likely it is to be read. 50 to 100 characters is a good target for a Facebook post, for example. Twitter imposes a maximum limit of 280 characters in all cases; around a hundred characters is generally recommended there too.
Example Facebook post – Http5000
4. Focusing on engagement
Watching the number of likes or followers on your page climb can feel very satisfying. But it is not the most important indicator to consider.
A page with thousands of followers will be no more impactful if those followers are not qualified — meaning fans who will share your content, talk about you, interact in the comments, or at the very least like your posts.
An unqualified community contributes little to your brand's visibility. A qualified community, on the other hand, will be a genuine ambassador. Prioritise quality over quantity.
Avoid buying followers: a page with many followers but no interaction signals content that interests no one (or, as the case may be, proves that those followers were bought). In either scenario, this is off-putting to genuine internet users.
To build engagement on your social networks, sharing your blog articles and other content is a starting point. But beyond that, ask your audience for their opinion on what they read. What do they think of a given topic? Did they already know a particular piece of information? The idea is to encourage them to comment and share their views, as well as discover your blog content. Similarly, explicitly asking them to share certain pieces of content will encourage them to do so. This is a good practice to use in moderation, however: if you ask for shares on absolutely every post, you will end up boring your community.
Finally, vary your content. If the goal is to draw people to your site, posting only links can become counterproductive in the long run. Share Facebook posts about your industry, post a few images from time to time, or even videos. The idea is to vary the types of content you offer on your social network as much as possible, in order to grow your community and therefore the number of people likely to click on your links in future.
We hope these 4 broad points give you an idea of best practices for giving visibility to your brand and, above all, to your content. We will return in future articles to explore some of the points raised here in greater detail.
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