Do your fans and followers actually see your posts?
Let’s remember the ultimate goal as we build out our social media audiences: building loyal communities that will buy more product and services, refer more new clients, and resist the temptation to buy from other vendors.
In order to encourage people to buy more products and services, it’s important to know the right way to reach our audience on each social media platform. They have to hear what we’re saying, right?
This article will focus on maximizing impressions for our messaging, particularly impressions for our promotional posts. Each social media platform requires different standards and best practices to maximize these impressions.
Facebook, for example, allocates impressions for your posts based on your EdgeRank. Facebook essentially assigns a ranking to your posts based on:
- past posts
- your page’s history
- the content of your posts
- and how people engage with your post during its first several impressions.
You can see this in action yourself; a post with a lot of engagement (say, a funny picture) will be very visible on Facebook, where an unexciting post (e.g. a short status update with no link or picture) will often go ignored.
Twitter, on the other hand, displays every post to every follower. The challenge on this medium is to make sure that your post gets seen before it gets ‘pushed down’ in the feed by other posts.
Other networks carry with them different idiosyncrasies. Yelp and YouTube tend to be very search-based and carry strategies similar to SEO, and FourSquare is not search-based at all… promotions tend to get seen if and only if clients are already onsite.
The table below captures some best practices we’re using to make our promotions stick. Please contact your account manager if you have questions about how we can better use your social networks to build your audience.
| Network | Best practices | Caveats |
| Use images Write compelling copy (keywords, images, humor) Request for shares Promote posts for inexpensive impressions | Don’t spam (this includes overpromoting or posting more than 3 times/day) | |
| Hashtags Request retweets (RT) More frequent posts (e.g. 3x Facebook) | Don’t spam (this includes too many or unrelated hashtags, or multiple identical posts) Monitor your audience | |
| Yelp | Request checkins Tastefully encourage reviews (contact your campaign manager for details) | Respond to negative reviews appropriatelyReview filtering Respond to positive reviews |
| Foursquare | Market onsite Rewards for frequent checkins | |
| Google+ | Hashtags Request shares | |
| YouTube | Use keywords | Titles should be descriptive and SEO friendly |
| Hashtags | Be careful about copyright |
If you’re not already a client, then contact us and we’ll talk to you about how we can maximize the effectiveness of your promotions.
