How to do social media when it's not your thing

Ways to think about social

Digital marketing is a way to promote your organisation using digital channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s easy to describe but hard to master, as digital moves fast and unpredictably. Different channels work unevenly between different businesses, and audiences interact in multiple ways at different times. This situation makes it challenging to present case studies to follow in the exact same way to get the same results.

A strong marketing strategy on social media isn’t too dissimilar to the traditional television or even radio marketing strategy. The common elements to a marketing success story have been the same since the creation of marketing—making it easy to remember and talk about a product with family and friends. Word of mouth is still the foundation; it’s just the devices that have been upgraded. Instead of talking about the latest amazing TVC we’ve seen, it’s watched on YouTube, then shared with people over Facebook and Twitter.

No longer is the water cooler the place to be. All that information is now in your pocket, on your phone. 78% of X (formerly Twitter) is conducted on mobile devices, which is why it’s called ‘the SMS of the internet’. Over 945 million Facebook users access their pages on their mobiles. This is why the first step most companies new to social media do is to have someone design their websites specifically to be mobile-friendly. If it can’t be seen and shared easily, it will be dismissed. Google thinks mobile is so strong that it changed its algorithm to rank mobile-friendly sites above desktop-only sites. So, the first rule of a successful transition has to be design before content.

Design before content

It is important that your brand is strong on social media and is designed specifically for those channels, just as you would for a print campaign. Remember that a poorly designed social presence can hurt your brand, so it’s important to be strategic about how you want your business to be viewed by your audience.

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Strategy, process, automation

First things first: what do you want to achieve? A clear direction is essential to reach your goals in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. A digital marketing strategy should be data-driven and focused on results. This way, your company can put the resources for the right digital marketing strategy to build brand awareness, cater to the mobile consumer, provide better ROI (return on investment), and obtain results that can be measured.

It is important to create and expand unique content—be creative, compelling, and consistent. Recent revelations (and previously known EEAT updates) to Google’s algorithm (see our latest blog on this: Increase Google ranking thanks to the 2024 algorithm leak) mean that content is still very much king. However, it is looking at what your content says and where it sits that is absolutely crucial to driving the success of your business. Refreshing the content on your website on a almost daily basis is not necessary to getting your brand noticed. In a world of content and social media, optimising and personalising what you say and communicate through your owned channels is must come first.

The main strategic points to consider when building your online presence include:

1. Social media branding: get it right and social can both make you look good and give you increased click throughs to your website. Win!
2. Social media style for content and images: everything you produce should reflect your brand and reflect it consistently—avoid randomly thrown-together posts from vastly different Canva templates.
3. Your website is your only owned digital channel, so that should be your first post of call for your content. Create a framework for what you want to write there, ensuring that your content maps to website traffic needed to drive leads to your paid offerings.
4. Create a social media calendar: set up goals for each channel and fill in the gaps to flesh out a strong schedule for you to refer to. This will make it easier for your business to meet content goals.
5. Automate your blog content to auto-post to your social channels for completely hands-free posting. Win.
6. Hook up Google Analytics to track your progress. It’s always good to know your ROI.
7. Look at the data: what’s working? What isn’t? Build on content that is doing well to rinse, repeat, reuse and recycle so all of this gets easier year on year.

Clients are more savvy to brand messaging than ever before and they are very vocal about brands that push self-serving content on them. In order to build a real relationship with your audience online, you need to be offering them content of real value, be that a special video or genuine knowledge that will help them. It is not search engine optimisation (SEO) versus social media optimisation (SMO), but both working together that lead to success.