10 Effective Postng Tips

What do you even post about? One unique idea I always suggest, (hold on to your seats), is to ask your clients.  

Firstly, what do your clients see you as an expert in, and why would they want your Posts and Tweets to follow them around?  Next, figure out what it is that your clients see you as the thought leader of.  Explore what you or your staff research, or create in your current business process; from this, what can be shared or distributed through Social Media.  This can be in the form of text, video, audio, events, contents, announcements, news, results, contests, or articles.  Figure out how often you have the ability to collect and share, and keep to that schedule.  Have your Social Media schedule be an extension of your Marketing efforts, helping you support your business efforts.       If you can indeed create your own original material, better yet.  If however, you cannot, it is still effective to be positioned as the gate keeper or the expert in whatever you are the thought leader of, and Post or Retweet others relevant articles.  Creating your own content is king in the digital world, as it helps with your search engine ranking.  Again, the Digital Tipping Point enables the Small Business Owner to utilize tools we could not afford before; whether you are using the written word  via a blog, or a video via YouTube, or audio via a Podcast, or Photos via Flickr, or a productline via Pinterest, or one of many others.  Creating your own material and then distributing them through either Facebook or Twitter, ie through Social Media tools, simply increases your importance on search engine tools, which in turn brings your website or blog higher in search results.

How do you Post? Remember that you should Post 5 educational Posts to 1 self-promoting Post.  Also, remember to not over or under whelm your followers with Posts.  The top reasons people stop following you are because your posts are full of marketing material only, you post too often, or your posts are boring, repetitive or too long.   

On Facebook, people in the US have 160 friends on average, and in Canada it's 260 friends. People log into Facebook every other day, so, when they log in, they see the most recent posts.  If you aren't posting often enough, they’ll never see your posts as your Posts will be buried under more recent posts.  If you Post all of your Posts at one time, and your follower happened to log on at that time, you’ll likely annoy them and they’ll stop following you.  So, you need to spread out your Posts.  Find out when your target market is online, and scatter your posts throughout a week at those times.  In general, Facebook has shared that the highest volume of viewers is from 10am to 4pm and then again at 8pm.  Ie if your target market is NOT online at 3am, do NOT post then!  They also say that people share and like Posts the MOST on Fridays more often then not!

The following elements get Shared, LIKEd or RETWEETED more than not:

• Be positive.  (People stop following negative rants!)
• Include a link to more information.   (You should fire staff who Post without a link!)
• Shorter than 80 characters in length. (Keep it short and sweet!)
• Simple language. 
• Include an ACTION.  (Please Share, Like or Retweet. Actually, saying "Please Retweet" gets more retweets than not saying it.  People often think "RT" alone means it's already been Reweeted.
• Include a NUMBER. (Ie "30 Solid 2012 Social Media Predictions"..)
• Avoid BUZZ words (ie "SEO Optimization...")
• Post when your clients are likely to be online.
• Friday Post get more LIKEs then any other day of the week.
• Edutainment (Be educational and entertaining), if you are funny, do let your humor out now!

These 10 tips will help you increase your online efforts' effectiveness! HAVE FUN!