Lesson 11

How to Work in Social Networks and What to Look For?

All social networks change over time, which is easily explained as the behavior of their customers is also changing, and social networks try to change their designs and priorities.

In other words, what worked yesterday might not work today.

However, the experts recommendations will definitely allow companies to maintain their social networks correctly and according to the rules, and a correct approach allows to do it effectively.

Where to start?

Studying the target audience.

First of all, even before setting up a company account in a particular network, you should analyze your target audience (TA). Who is your current or potential customer.

Usually, it is difficult to distinguish all by some signs, therefore, 70% of customers are taken as the core of the TA.

It is important to understand where these people live, their age, gender, interests, travel frequency and other parameters, as well as in what social networks these people spend their time.

It is also important to understand what kind of content, what manner, and what style will be suitable for this audience.

Who is important among subscribers?

Brand advocates.

Then, you need to research what kind of people you would like to see among your subscribers. It will be perfect, if you single out brand advocates or fans among them. Each business can have its own fan categories. For example, museums can have regular visitors or people who often donate something to the museum, or teachers, who take schoolchildren on museum tours, or guides leading their tourists to the museum. For a hotel, it can be airline employees who permanently stay in this hotel, or some families, regularly staying in the hotel for the weekend, or people constantly arriving on business trips. For a travel agency, it can be regular customers who are ready to visit the whole globe only with this travel agency, who actively share photos and impressions of their trips on their social networks. So, they will be the engaged subscribers who will maintain the ranking of your page with their comments and likes. Perhaps such people are already among your current customers – it would be nice to find out what social networks they use.

It would also be nice to encourage brand advocates in multiple ways – for example, to mention them in your social networks, to share their posts in your feed. It would be pleasant for them, so they will continue to support your brand.

This is important, because all pages in any social network are focused on engagement. If you have a lot of subscribers – but no engagement – no one will see your posts.

Is it free?

No, organic coverage will be reducing.

Another trend is reducing of organic coverage in all social networks. This means that not all subscribers will see your posts, but only a small part of them. According to various studies of marketers – it is about 6%.

There are 2 ways to increase the visibility of your posts, which are good to apply together:

Engaging content that your users will comment

Learn and use targeted advertising. Moreover, you can configure it so, that your subscribers or their friends, or subscribers from a certain location, or subscribers with certain interests, etc. could see your posts.

Note. Do not use targeted ads without a separate study. It is best to learn from guide books that a particular social network provides itself.

All references to guide books are in the 7th lesson.

What else?

Content plan

Many marketers recommend creating a headline and content plan for pages. This is done in order not to bore the public with the same type of content. For each business, it will be individual and indicate – what topic and type of post to publish on a particular day.

Should I post regularly?

Desirable, but not at all costs

In modern social networks, the principle of fasting every day is a thing of the past. Firstly, it’s useless, and often harmful, because when you publish content that is uninteresting to your subscribers, the social network indicates it and reduces its organic reach. And it makes no sense to advertise uninteresting content for money. In general, aimless and low-content posts are not helpful for anyone, and first of all for you. Moreover, uninteresting posts, if they go in series, force users to unsubscribe.

How to understand the mood and perception of a particular social network?

Sign up as a regular user.

Each social network has peculiarities of perception and expectations of users, so we recommend before creating an account in a particular social network – sign up as a private person and see what other users, similar companies or even competitors post up.

How to understand what works – and what doesn’t?

Use statistics and deeply analyze what is happening, whether users are subscribing or unsubscribing, whether engagement is growing or falling, whether the number of conversions is increasing or falling, whether your content gets to the right target audience, how your page looks in contrast with your competitors, etc.

As we mentioned earlier, there are internal and external statistics:

Internal – what is happening inside the social network

External – Yandex metrika and Google analytics

And the last one – many marketers believe that social networks are more suitable for increasing the visibility of a brand and its products, increasing customer awareness and strengthening communications, and warming up customers. Perhaps it makes sense to listen to them and drive your policy on social networks properly.