I can easily say that social media is becoming a main ingredient for an organization’s strategic plan and sufficient knowledge of all social platforms is essential.
This semester, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to take a class titled ” Social Media and PR”, which has honestly opened my eyes to the reality of how important social media actually is. Our final project included a fictitious company, for whom we had to find a target audience, create strategies, tactics and objectives, a strategic social media plan and a social media crisis communications.
Now when I first started working on this project, I knew I wanted to tackle the social media plan, so my group mates took on the other tasks. Little did I know how much time and research creating this plan would need! It was an absolute blast creating it, but it taught me so much about how different Twitter and Facebook really are.
Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media platforms for businesses, but how should you utilize it to help make your business successful? While researching, I found two articles that explain the tweet types you should use in your social media strategy. They include:
- Questions
- Quotes
- Interesting Facts
- Conversation
- Retweets
- Slice of Life
These types of tweets are designed to encourage audience engagement and interaction. Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, they have to get to the point quickly in order to capture the attention of the audience. Hashtags also must be used effectively. They are a great way to increase audience engagement if used correctly, as they can support individual conversations about particular topics.
I had so much fun creating my Twitter plan, but it took so many hours to put it all together. So when it came time to tackle Facebook, I thought I would basically be able to copy my ideas from Twitter and simply paste them into a Facebook social media plan. But, I was wrong! Facebook and Twitter are used to reach completely different audiences and must be approached in a different way than Twitter. So, it was back to the drawing board for me!
Facebook has been around for a while but it is slowly losing users to new social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. So how can you utilize Facebook to reach your audience and keep them interested in engaging with you on this slowly shrinking network? I found a great article outlining how to get the most engagement out of your Facebook posts. They need to:
- Use engaging copy, images and video
- Create two-way communication
- Share exclusive discounts and promotions
- Be timely
- Target your posts
- Use links to drive people to your website
By using this guideline, you will be able to actively reach your audience and have them conversing with you in no time! With Facebook, you have a little more leeway with the amount of characters you can include in each post, so make sure to start each post off with your most important information and then include anything else that may be relevant. Hashtags really aren’t that effective on Facebook, so use them sparingly.
So hopefully this will help you differentiate between posts that should be used on Twitter versus Facebook. As always, practice makes perfect, so try making a few trial social media plans before actually launching one for yourself or a client!
