The best ways to use social media for work and play
Career

The best ways to use Social Media for work and play

As a social media manager there are so many top tips that I have learned along the way to help with my personal social media accounts and also my client’s social media accounts. I’ve learned that no one size fits all, you can’t put a square peg in a round hole, yet the same basic principles and practices apply to personal and business accounts. So here goes, here are just some of the ways in which you can use social media for work and play, to make it work for you (and your clients).

Find your tribe

It’s a bit like finding your flock. Who are the supporters of your account? What is your niche? As a parenting blogger with more recently a shift towards home interiors, my flock is mostly parents and other house renovation accounts on Instagram. I follow them and I support them, and hopefully they will do the same for me – helping my accounts to grow, to thrive and to work their way up the social media algorithms (depending upon the platform).

Identify what platform works for you

As a business owner my favourite platform is Instagram, and one that I love running for my clients, alongside Pinterest. Different individuals and business have different needs. If you have a very visual account or business, your focus is most likely suited towards Instagram and Pinterest. If you’re running a business account that’s trying to appeal to other businesses you may find that Twitter and LinkedIn is far better. It’s all about working out where your audience is, what platforms they are using and when.

Create your style

Whether you are running your own social media channels for your own business or managing your a client’s channel, you will need to create a style. How does each image look. What is the tone of voice. All of this is really important to appeal to your target audience and to create consistency within your feed. Once you’ve found your style you should create a social media mockup to demonstrate to your client or yourself what your feed or grid will look. There are amazing bundles that you can use to create the image for each social media post whether that be for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

The best ways to use social media for work and play

Know your audience

Understand the groups of people who you are trying to talk to and reach out to. If you’re a parenting related business this would be parents and parenting bloggers, if you’re an interior design business this could be architects, interior designers, and interior bloggers. You will need to write copy that appeals to them, and shows them the value of your business, whilst encouraging them to follow you and to engage with your account. It’s vital that you know who you are talking to, to help your social media grow, but also so you are not trying to talk to everyone which could become very time consuming.

Engage!

To put it crudely, don’t dump and run. Writing the post is only part of the job, the next step is to engage with your audience and followers by liking and commenting on their posts. Share their content on your stories or repost it to your social media channels. Without paid advertising, this is one of the only ways that you’re only going to grow organically, or live in hope that a major influencer mentions your brand or profile, or shares your content.

So those are just some of the ways to use social media for work and play. Tell me what are your top tips?

Claire x

Best ways to use social media for work and play

This is a collaborative post. 

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Spam prevention powered by Akismet