A Guide to Mastering Social Media in Your Nine-to-Five
By: Thom Gallet
Tags: Work, Professional Development, Business, Marketing, Social Media

Rule 1: Capture your company’s persona.

Personal social media accounts and influencers will generally have a much higher engagement rate than corporations.

This is because a personal account resonates, embodying a character behind the screen. Companies lack this depth, thus giving them lower engagement overall.

You may think social media posting is somewhat standardized, but everyone has a unique digital fingerprint to them.

Your captions and tweets reflect your personal opinion and voice. They show your charm, humor, creativity, and confidence, basically, everything that makes you, you. Your photography also represents your general nature. More extroverted people will have brighter vibrant pictures while introverted people have darker photos, with higher contrast. Even past the style, the subjects and purposes of the images reflect your personality in a variety of ways.

Fragments of you are ironed into every post you make, sometimes subtly, and sometimes explicitly. These fragments are why people choose to follow you and why your posts engage more with people who like you as a person.

Most organizations lack this coherent, relatable persona. Skill in social media is weighed heavily by capturing this essence of your organization in your messaging, finding said persona.

To efficiently capture your organization’s voice, create a character with stereotypical traits, as a representation of your employer. Personally, I like using high school archetypes as templates, as they are easy to relate too.

Is your organization a typical keener, do they pride themselves on academic knowledge? Or maybe your organization is a jock, someone popular who tries to be a leader in their network, with an emphasis on reputation.

Using these templates, you can build out a persona, and give your organization a coherent voice on social media for years to come.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Rule 2: Be genuine, don’t copy success.

It’s very tempting to look at the best social media accounts and try to be exactly like them. Pitching, we need to be more like Wendy’s Twitter may seem like a good idea, but in practice, it fails every time.

When you mimic social media voices, you lose everything unique to your audience, including your organizational values.

Remember, the people who follow you do so for a reason. If you change your tone on social media attempting to be more mainstream, you will lose those followers.

Keep your posts genuine and core to your organization by being unique.

Just because your organization isn’t going viral for snappy remarks every other week, doesn’t mean you aren’t a success.

Rule 3: Keep it minimal, lose the blocks of text.

A much more practical tip is keeping all of your posts clean and simplistic.

Way too many times, I see posts on Facebook and Instagram with extended drawn out captions, or photos with multiple graphics and blocks of text pasted within.

To you, all of this information may be relevant and interesting, but I can assure you that your audience does not have this kind of time. Posts are only as valuable as the viewership they receive, and an overly informative post with no audience accomplishes nothing.

Assume every post gets two seconds of attention, which I’ll be frank, is being generous. In those two seconds, you need to draw attention to a coherent message. You aren’t going to do this with blocks of texts and sophisticated graphics.

Social media is intended to have elegant, simple messaging. Give yourself five to ten words and a clean image to get your message across, then hit them with the information after the click-through.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Rule 4: Build a versatile posting strategy.

Social media calendars exist for a reason, they help us stay organized while pushing out specific messaging and campaigns in a coordinated fashion. They help you show superiors the macro ideas behind the campaigns and allow you to put a leash on the chaos that is the essence of social media content.

Social media calendars allow you to stay organized, but they can, unfortunately, deter engagement. Following a schedule won’t let you be flexible in your posts, which is one of the biggest attractions of social media. Current event opinions and commentary resonate much more with audiences than a week old messaging campaign ever will.

People want to see the information that affects them in the day-to-day, not umbrella topics they consistently hear about everywhere they go.

Let’s say you are a non-profit hosting a campaign to raise money for climate change. A general awareness post may be relevant, but it just won’t stand-out. However, posting through the context of the environmental impacts resulted from the Amazon being burned is guaranteed to get much more traction.

People identify deeper with something current, something they are already thinking about.

To do this, you have to be willing to take risks and be spontaneous in your posting strategy. I usually aim for a healthy balance by building a month-to-month foundation of content with room to include posts that might see more engagements given certain events.