We had two great questions from our HyperTip Wheel this week about social media.
The first was from Steve May from Steve May Financial Services.
Steve asked: Do you think it’s best to have an app that sends outposts to all social media platforms, or is it better to tailor the posts to each platform separately?
It can become tempting for individuals, business owners and marketers to post the same content out on all social media platforms with no variation to the wording, imagery or content. With the amount of third-party scheduling apps growing, it’s making marketing easier to manage.
These apps can be used to post to multiple accounts at a time and to forward schedule your social media content. It is important to optimise the content and imagery to take advantage of the medium. For example, Instagram is more of a visual platform with photos usually being square and it also requires optimising your hashtags to attract audience reach and engagement. On Facebook, there are different types of content, however a landscape image of a particular aspect ratio is best used for a linked post. meaning any click on your image will link to your webpage.
Therefore, cross posting from Instagram to Facebook is not a good idea as you are creating just a photo post rather than a linked post, missing out on the chance to drive traffic to your website and achieve a conversion. This is just one of the reasons why you should alter your posts to ensure that your followers don’t tune out and you experience a drop-in engagement or following.
Another factor to consider is that your audience is going to be different on each channel according to their demographics and behavioural attributes. Evidently, these markets are going to have different engagement needs.
Our best tips are:
- Tailor the posts to suit the platform features and audience that you’re trying to reach.
- Keep up to date with social platform changes and engage with your audience to gain a deeper understanding of what they like and times when they are using their accounts.
Yes, use an app to conveniently schedule your posts at the right times, however, tailor your content first to each platform and go from there. The second question was from Raz O’Connor from Ronnoco.
Raz asked: Do social platforms penalise posts from e.g. Hootsuite vs using their in-app post manager?
Social platforms do not penalise posts whether you’re using a third-party scheduling tool or an in-app post manager.
As I said in Steve’s response what will affect your reach on social media channels is the quality of the content, imagery or video that encourages engagement. In the past we did see a negative impact, however, this is no longer evident.
Go ahead and utilise third party scheduling to make your social management a little easier but stay aware of the tips we’ve spoken about.
Stay tuned for next week’s topic and allow the team at HyperWeb to answer your questions every Friday!
