This week we’ve interviewed a social media manager to get more on-the-ground tips of how to leverage social media to drive traffic. We’ve rounded this up into 3 quick tips to help you!
This post is an interview with Josh Stewart, Social Media Manager for Educations Media Group.
Our goal is to drive people to our website, and social media plays a huge role in this. Once we started posting daily we saw a 140% uplift in our traffic, which prompted the company to invest more heavily in social media as a means to achieve our goals (which is great news for me!)
1. Use content curation to share the posts that are already talking about you
I normally start with some content curation. It’s really important that we’re not using social media as a sales tool – no one likes to log onto Twitter and see a bunch of companies yelling about how great they are – so a big part of our strategy involves content curation. I use a tool called ahrefs to crawl all of the latest news articles that would be interesting to our customers and pick some of the best ones that we can share online.
If they’re really good and we feel like we have something to add into the discussion, sometimes we’ll work a piece of content up and link back to the curated piece that was our inspiration.
2. Use scheduling
I don’t like the idea of scheduling a whole bunch of posts in advance and then letting them rattle off – the whole point of social media is to be on the pulse, to be present and online and ready to engage with anyone that might want to reply. So I look at my schedule a week in advance, rather than months, because new stuff crops up all the time, new things are trending and we have to be on top of all of that.
Normally I’ll have a look at what we’ve got going on as a business for the coming week and whether there are any events that we (or our partners) are running that our followers would like to see. I’ll also have a look at what National Days are coming up (like did you know there’s a national caesar salad day? I definitely didn’t before working in social media!) and whether we have anything that could be relevant. So we’ll definitely post for National Learning at Work Week, but we probably wouldn’t do anything for something like World Arthritis Day. I don’t like the idea of jumping into conversations that you have no place being in, I think it’s awkward from a customer point of view and not true to brand from a business one.
3. Images are key
I have a quick catch up with our in-house Graphic Designer, Darrah, who will help me put together images, texts or even infographics that we can share on social. You have to be careful about the amount of text you include in social media posts if you’re paying for advertising, but if it’s organic you can be a bit more flexible. Usually though we find a really strong image works better, without any text at all, to get people to click and find out more.
Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.
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