In 2021, social media is a must for your company marketing strategy. In 2020, according to Statistica, over 3.6 billion people (yes, billion!) were using social media worldwide—a number that is expected to grow to almost 4.41 billion by 2025.
By creating and maintaining company social accounts, you can reach new clients, consumers, and business partners. But how do you make sure your social media is the best it can be? Well, to start, you can avoid these top three worst social media practices of 2021.
Posting and Ghosting
If you’ve been on social media for a while, you might have heard of the term “post and ghost.” Posting and ghosting refers to the act of posting on your social media and then immediately logging back off.
Why is that bad? Think about it this way: If you went into a meeting, pitched your new idea, and then immediately left the room or Zoom call, what would you coworkers think? They’d be wondering why you’re not interacting with them or elaborating on what you said, and it’s possible they would be less likely to interact with you in the future.
If you just post on social media and then just leave, don’t expect much engagement on your post. In 2018, Facebook majorly changed their algorithm to promote more personal, one of their reasons for the update was that: “Interacting with people is associated with a greater sense of well-being… On the other hand, just scrolling through your Facebook feed, passively reading or watching without interacting with others, tends to make people feel worse.” Simply put, big platforms want you to be interacting with your community.
The lesson here? Don’t just walk out of the meeting when it’s over—stick around to chat (if you get what we’re saying).
Low-Effort Community Interaction
Similar to the “post and ghost,” we’d suggest incorporating intentional and meaningful community interaction into your social media strategy. Social media is social, meaning in order to get engagement, you also need to give quality engagement to your community.
Posting and liking other posts are the bare minimum of social media. To really become a quality social account, you need to go beyond the quick swipe and like; you need to be performing high engagement through commenting, sharing, following, and starting conversations.
In research done by Buffer, Sprout Social, and Jay Baer’s Research, it was found that the more brand’s interact with their community beyond a simple “like,” the greater increase of brand loyalty they saw in return. In fact, in a report done by Sprout Social, they found that 30% of customers who are shunned/ignored on social media are more likely to switch to a competitor.
It’s simple, the more you truly engage on the platform—posting, commenting, sharing, following—the more engagement you will see in return on your posts. Here are just a few ways you can interact on social media beyond just liking posts:
- Find & follow people in your community
- Congratulate your business partners on social by commenting on their posts
- Offer up shoutouts through feed posts and stories
- Comment on posts you see in your feed and show your genuine interest, not just a one-word or one-emoji response
- Share community posts you enjoy on your stories
- Create and maintain social friends
Prioritizing Quantity over Quality
Over here at Eternity, we’re making 2021 the year of value-driven social media. When we expanded into offering social media services in mid-2020, the clients we met with kept saying the same thing over and over: We don’t just want posts, we want something memorable.
Gone are the days of just throwing spaghetti to the wall and seeing if it sticks. With most major social platforms now being over or close to a decade old (Facebook is about to celebrate its sweet 16), there is a craving to see original and valuable content on our feeds—content that offers something tangible.
This year, instead of just making a random last-minute post just to post something, we would suggest stopping your thumb from hitting “send.” Instead, if you don’t have anything of real value for your audience, wait until you do. Critically sit down and think about your posts far in advance so that you have time to think about how you can make an interesting post for your viewers. For some Eternity clients, we schedule their posts out four weeks ahead of the current date. That way, we have ample room to stop, think, and add value.
With these three social media stay-aways, you’re sure to start enhancing your social media presence. Looking for more social media tips to start off your new year? You can follow our social media for more at @eternityweb on Instagram, and by following these links for Facebook and LinkedIn.
