The number of social media channels are increasing and so are the users on these channels, so it is important now more than ever to get involved and join the hype!
To be precise, the number of active social media users worldwide has increased by 21% since January 2016 according to Smart Insights.
Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, but it is important to not forget Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In and Twitter!
However, it’s not as ‘easy peasy’ as many think.
“We can just post the same content across all channels” we hear many say. WRONG.
Remember, many of your audience will be active on various social media channels and they may follow you on a number of these. They do not want to see the same messaging over-and-over again. This can lead to ‘advertising wear-out’, whereby the message will be ignored, which is not what we want!
You need to adapt written content for multiple platforms to increase post reach and visibility. If you’re not changing content format to improve your overall reach, then you aren’t maximizing the full potential of your content!
Among the many ways to adapt content on social media, one that often gets overlooked is voice and tone which provides ‘authentic communication’. Voice is the big-picture view of how you communicate on social media, and tone is the individual instances—the conversations, the channels, the interactions—where voice is applied. We suggest that you should be slightly more informative on Facebook as you have a greater amount of characters to play with; make your tweets full of personality on Twitter; and be ‘punny’ with your Instagram captions…and remember to remain professional on Linked in!
Our top tip to keep track of your content is to simply create a spreadsheet containing headings for each social media channel and each day of the month, then plan all your posts. This is a great way to plan as you can identify which posts are going out on each channel and when, enabling you to adapt the written content effectively.
However, in order to track timings of scheduled posts, we recommend that you use the social media marketing management tool, Hootsuite. This tool also allows you to plan and schedule posts, so everything is in one place, hooray! This will enable you to keep track of where and when messages are being posted; and also the imagery that goes with them.
It is so important to switch up your visual content to keep your audience engaged and maximize your full potential! So mix up the copy between channels for the same content piece.
Let us know how you switch up your content formats!