Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Today, you'll be hard-pressed to find brands that aren't attempting to make it on social media. Indeed, it is undeniable that social media is a formidable marketing and communication tool for companies that want to:

• improve their visibility and image.

• strengthen the link with their community.

• increase online and/or point-of-sale returns.

While generating engagement on social media is a good thing, doing it in a relevant and effective way is better - but also more difficult!

Applying some social media marketing best practice methodology is the starting point for implementing a mind-blowing strategy that boosts your online presence and drives leads for your business!

And, since we have so many experts at Facelift, we've condensed some basic, key social media marketing best practices for a reliable social media campaign that your team can adopt with ease.

How do I post properly on social media?

Obviously, there are fundamentals to follow in order to communicate well across all of your social media platforms.

Many parameters must be considered. These include but are not limited to the type of content you're producing, the choice of keywords, the frequency of publication, your tone of voice and more.

It is therefore also quite important to define your editorial line before beginning your content creation process itself.

If you haven't already started optimizing your daily social media practices, here are some of the main points to adopt as soon as possible.👇

• Set up an editorial calendar and plan your publications through a tool that centralizes your actions in one convenient place.
• Improve your storytelling skills! Speak on behalf of the brand, its history, your products, and your products and services.
• Alternate the types of posts and visual categories that you produce. Make sure to use a blend of photos and videos of products, events, commercial operations, and more. Visual content is among the highest performing.
• Use emojis to capture attention 😊!
• Practice proper usage of white space and content aesthetics in your texts. This will help you to catch the eye of social media users scrolling through their feeds.
• Use strong and impactful words!
• Prioritize quality over quantity: our customer success account managers recommend about 3 publications per week.
• Recognize your partners when their products or events are highlighted. What goes around on social media often comes around!
• Bonus tip: Facelift Cloud can save you time and energy on many of these points! It's ideal for if setting up a multi-network editorial calendar and managing a large team!

How to create effective visuals on social network

Did you know that there are more than 8 billion video views on Facebook alone each day?

Visuals are a strong element in the success or failure of your social media publications. Indeed, with the abundance of posts that the average user scrolls through in their news feeds, standing out from the crowd has never been more important – or as difficult.

As we know, our brain retains images more easily than words. Eye-catching visuals are essential to capturing the attention of your target audience.

It's up to you to find the right balance between formats based on your budget and team composition. Video content generally outperforms other types, but by diversifying your formats you have the ability to reach an even wider audience.

Our experts have observed and collected several more social media marketing best practices that work particularly well with Facelift Cloud's users. These include, but are not at all limited to:

• Using images that highlight their brand or products.  
• The objective here is to redirect fans to your stores or your website by putting your company front and center online.
  
• Organizing visuals well: choose a clean and tidy place to maintain all your digital media, such as a graphics library.
• Work with a tight frame and choose the optimal angle of view (take multiple pictures!).
• The product appears in its entirety and should generally be centered.
  A plain and clear background allows for better visualization.
• Before publishing, retouch, crop and resize the photo if necessary. Don't skimp on the attention to detail!

How to stimulate engagement on social networks

The Holy Grail for all community and social media managers is to have a very high engagement rate.

The volume of followers or subscribers is one thing, but the degree of engagement of your audience is the key indicator to follow to analyze the effectiveness of your publications. A million followers may boost your ego, but what good are they if they never actually engage or convert?

Moreover, as social networking platforms evolve and change their algorithms and features, continuing to create engaging content is a never-ending game.

These tips below are valid for all platforms and have long survived the test of time 👇.

• Use diverse and original content that plays on emotion, humor and empathy with users.
• Be authentic and add an individualized touch.
• Develop participative content (contests, questions, polls...) to build connections with your social media followers.
• Create events that bring people together on social networks (end of year celebrations, national events, sales, summer vacations, etc.) 🎆

How to manage customer relations on social networks

Social networks often bring together several areas of expertise in companies.

On the one side you have marketing and social media managers, and on the other hand, customer service teams.

Why is this so?

Social networks have revolutionized the way customers interact with brands. Customers are now asking for a more direct and interactive exchange.

On the company side, the customer experience is all about a high degree of individual attention and personalization.

To stay on top of that, here are some more basic guidelines to follow:

• Always speak and respond on behalf of the brand.

• Share and animate your community, respond to private messages, comments, opinions, etc.

• Show empathy.

• If needed, take several moments to craft a well-made response. For inspiration or assistance, you can also try facelift's free social media response templates

• Redirect to the responsible department or collaborator if it's not your area of expertise.

As social media is a discipline at the crossroads of several areas of your business, it is important to have a central and collaborative tool.

Our experts have plenty more social media marketing best practice recommendations up their sleeves that we'd love to share!

Whether it's for the production and planning of your content or for the management of your community, they'll be happy to answer all your questions, our experts are standing by to give you the personalized attention your social media needs require.