4 tips to instantly refresh your social media game

refresh your social media game

Aimee Dewar (@AimeeDewar) is a freelancer in book design and social media. She works with multiple clients across different sectors, including Head & Heart Book Design, in typesetting and social media. She is also the current Social Media Manager for the London branch of the Society of Young Publishers. You can find her website here.

Social media can seem like a waiting game. Anticipating the likes, comments, shares, or retweets before they start trickle in can be agonising. Will your audience engage? Will they even see your content in their forever-updating feed? More importantly, will people click through to your website, join your mailing list, enter your competition, or purchase your product?

Whilst (sadly) there is no sure-fire method, there are a number of steps you can take to help build a more memorable, personalised output across your social channels, so that, over time, your audience can’t help but sit up and take notice.

1) Keep it consistent

The hard work is likely done, with your brand, services and products, logo and key imagery already in place. But be sure to consistently translate these features onto your social media channels.

Ideally, your content should be instantly recognisable across your social platforms. Creating imagery that includes your logo or uses your brand colours can achieve this at a glance. You can also use non-visual elements of your social presence; your tone of voice or online ‘personality’ of your brand or company, and posting content that is laser-focussed towards your audience.

For Head & Heart Book Design, I create or share visuals that compliment our black and white branding, and strive to diversify our content away from just our services or products. We retweet industry news, share useful competitions or opportunities, live-Tweet relevant events, and share literary quotes.

By keeping your aims, strategies and imagery consistent, your followers will know what to expect from your content, and should keep coming back for more.

2) Create a schedule 

Posting regularly is key, and schedules can help you post without hesitation. If your content is reliable, both in terms of what you are posting and when you are posting it, your followers should begin to spot it in their feed each week. For instance, on Mondays we share motivational quotes, and circulate recent testimonials on Wednesdays.

This doesn’t mean you can’t post ad hoc (as this is especially good to do on Twitter), but it will give you the foundations of your regular social media presence without having magic up a post under pressure.

3) Use the right tools

Canva is fast becoming the online design tool to create effortless visuals that are high-resolution, eye-catching, professional and, fundamentally, can be quickly edited to compliment your brand’s existing imagery. No Adobe or design skills are required, but there’s room to add your own flair.

For Instagram, Later lets you write, schedule and preview your posts in advance, and sends you a notification when it’s time for your content to go live. It also stores all your media, so you can dip into your pool of images to quickly create an effective post.

Keep track of the statistics your posts are generating (such as link clicks, likes, shares, and how many people are seeing your posts) with Twitter Analytics, a completely free and an incredibly useful resource.

Finally, review if your audience have engaged with your call-to-action by checking out how many link clicks you have achieved through link-shortening applications such as Bitly.com.

4) Team up

Boost your social media game with a hearty dose of collaboration.

Join weekly hashtags and chats on Twitter. At Head & Heart, we engage with the weekly hashtag #FontSunday, a collaborative celebration of typography based around a weekly theme and hosted by The Design Museum. Do a bit of research into hashtags and chats that sit within your realm of the industry, and get involved!

We have also showcased our team and industry partners, teamed up with other companies to offer our services as part of prizes for writers’ competitions, and talked about our involvement in events that are relevant to our followers.

What are you doing to re-invigorate your social media at the moment? What’s been working for you, or not working? And what tools can you recommend? I’d love to know!

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