Marketing
Social media: what to decide before you post anything at all
· 4 min read ·
The normal state of a small company's social media is this: four accounts open, one of them fed in fits and starts, the last post fourteen months old, and an intern who's since left, taking the password to two of them with them.
An abandoned account is worse than having no account at all. Anyone who lands on it walks away confirming the company's lost interest — and it shows up when people search the company's name, often ahead of the website.
Choose one. Just one
The most useful decision you can make is to close or freeze the ones you're not going to keep up with, and put everything into one.
Which one depends on who's buying, not on what you fancy. If you sell to businesses, where your customers spend their working time is a different place from where they'd be if you sold to consumers. If what you do can be seen — a finished job, a space, a product, a transformation — the platform needs to be visual; if what you do needs explaining, text can work.
An honest shortcut: go and see where your competitors actually get engagement, not just where they have an account. It's usually just one, and it's usually obvious.
What to post is already on your phone
The question “what do we post?” tends to bring everything to a halt, and the answer is sitting in the calls the company takes every week.
The questions customers ask every week are content. Yesterday's job, photographed halfway through, is content. Something that went wrong, and what was done to fix it, is content — and some of the best kind. An explanation of why something costs what it costs is content.
What isn't content: congratulating everyone on World Whatever Day, stock images with motivational quotes on them, and announcements that the company's off on holiday. That's what fills up most pages, and it's why nobody follows them.
Once a week, forever
The frequency that works is the one you can keep up in the month the company is snowed under with work. Not the one you plan out in January.
One post a week for two years is worth incomparably more than five a week for six weeks and then nothing. Consistency is what builds the habit in whoever's following you — and it's also what the platforms' own algorithms reward.
If you can put together a month's worth of material in one morning — photographing three jobs, writing four answers to common questions — you stop depending on inspiration, which is where this usually dies.
Replying counts for more than posting
The part almost everyone skips. A company that replies to every comment and every message within a few hours gets more out of social media than one that posts twice as much and never replies.
This is where it stops being publicity and starts being sales: half the direct messages a company page gets are enquiries disguised as questions. If nobody reads them for three days, the business has gone elsewhere.
It's worth deciding who replies, and within how long, and making sure it doesn't depend on that person happening to have their phone in hand.
How to know if it's worth it
Not by followers or likes. Those numbers almost always go up, and they don't pay the bills.
What matters is whether enquiries came in, how many, and whether whoever came in through that route actually does business with you. Just ask “how did you hear about us?” on the form and on the phone, and track it for three months.
You might well conclude that, in your case, social media doesn't bring in customers — and that's a perfectly valid result, one that hands you back a few hours a week. In some sectors the answer lies in showing up in local search rather than in posting. If you decide to invest, that's what we do in social media.
Got abandoned accounts?
Tell us where you have a presence and who buys what you sell. We'll help you choose one platform and set a pace you can actually keep up.