John Kennedy

At Kennedy Andersson we hope to help you find your Social Media sweet spot. You will find a list of tips & tricks that we have used, tried and tweaked. It will depend where you are on your Social Media voyage, just boarding, cruising along or maybe even thinking about jumping ship! Tips & Tricks for Social Media success. 1: Make sure you open an account, maintain and update the professional profile with logo, values, contact details and branding that is consistent with all your other communication channels. Remember your passwords, set up the account administrator and keep your customer in mind when you start ”Social Selling” – which is all about the social and less about the selling. 2: Add or create related #Hashtags To make your posts automatically recognisable and easy to find use a #hashtag that relates to your brand or product and makes sense to your followers or fans. 3: Create a memorable Social Media account cover image Your social media cover is prime real estate, a billboard for brand messages, promotions and special events. Use a free tool like Canva.com that comes with prebuilt templates. 4: Develop a Regular YouTube channel If you’ve identified video as an important component of your social media strategy, then keep up to date with new content and monitor what is happening within your industry so that you can educate on the latest trends. 5: Evaluate, evaluate and evaluate! What works for one brand may not work for another, which means it is important to consistently review your performance against your goals. 6: Fulfill followers’ requests Customers rely on social media for product and website support increasingly. Keep an eye on your notifications to keep your response time to a minimum. 7: Join relevant public conversations Social selling can be about social relationship management where you are directly engaging with stakeholders in online conversations or it could be you making a contribution to a group where you are a subject matter expert. Both occasions give you an opportunity to educate rather than sell. 8: Keep your updates brief Think like your customer, are you providing value in what you are writing? 9: Launch New Products If you have a something new to promote, your first ”go-to” audience can be on social media, develop your beta version with feedback from your online community. 10: Minimise negative feedback When companies post on social media, they open themselves up to positive and negative feedback. Respond to customer concerns in a timely manner and minimise any negative buzz. 11. Navigate users to landing pages A landing page is a great destination for your audience, use and test different call-to-action buttons to bring potential leads to your website where you can nurture the relationship. 12. Optimise YouTube videos YouTube is the second largest search engine. To get the best exposure, optimise the video’s title and description with keywords for search. 13: Pay attention to your best times to post A lot of trial and error goes into creating a social media communication plan. Review your activity, see what gets the most engagement for your brand and plan your actions accordingly. 14: Questions on social media Questions are great conversation starters and serve as market research. Tie a post or picture into a question about an event, holiday or trending topic with a #hashtag. 15: Return to an update and edit The edit function on Facebook makes it easy to update original posts and inform your audience of what’s happening. 16: Spend time interacting on Twitter Maintaining a presence on social media requires give and take. Don’t just tweet. Respond to tweets from followers and share the love. 17: Try a short branded URL Shortened URLs have become the norm, keep the focus on your message and make it easy to read. 18: Use short calls-to-action Whether it’s to buy, save, comment or explore, ask your followers to take action with a few carefully crafted words. 19: Next steps Once you are up and running, and on your way to becoming a social media guru, keep the following in mind: o o o o o o o o Agree the right way that you as a company want to be perceived Set realistic expectations of what you want to achieve Create enough quality content to feed the social media beast Leverage a consistent message across a number of digital channels, not just social media Overcome the social media “dip”, be patient with results, keep up the investment of time and content Educate others more than you promote yourself in your social selling Don’t take yourself too seriously And remember you can’t grow what you can’t measure And just in case you did not remember our blog, below is a checklist to keep you on top of your social media tasks: Social Media Checklist Today 1. Open a social media account, update the professional profile with images, text and contact details consistent with all your other channels – remember your passwords, agree a guideline on how you interact as a brand online and you are on your way to “Social Selling” 2. Create your buyer personas if you are going to be able to align your efforts with the correct target audience Daily 3. Respond to messages, monitor brand mentions and research what’s trending 4. Create conversations, find and engage with potential customers 5. Post 3/6 times on Twitter, 1/2 times on Facebook, 1/2 times on LinkedIn 6. Keep up a ratio of around 4:1, of educational content versus information on your company 7. Monitor the competition Weekly 8. Search for industry “thought leaders” to engage with 9. Discuss tactics with your team 10. Start to look at your statistics – do you need to change anything, retweet or re-post a successful article? 11. Look outside your window, see what is going on in the world around you – broaden your perspective Monthly 12. Assess your performance against goals and milestones 13. Audit your strategy – “look outside in” 14. Checkout the automated tools that can make a difference to the amount of time you are allocating to social media Hopefully we will be connecting sometime soon on social media! Kennedy Andersson is an Inbound Marketing agency with offices in Örebro and Stockholm, Sweden. We combine strategic planning and compelling ideas with the inbound marketing methodology. We specialise in the business-to-business (B2B) segment where we have a combined 50 years of practical business experience. The goal of Kennedy Andersson is to help companies grow, understand their pain and provide an affordable and successful solution. We exist to provide a cost effective, easy to apply and successful approach to growing sales in the B2B segment and we could not do that without the help of HubSpot. There have been big shifts in how buyers behave, we owe that to some extent to the Internet revolution and how this has helped put the power back into the hands of the buyer, now we face a call of “seller beware”. How buyers or customers use the tools available to them for research and education have major implications on any business that has a focus on sales and marketing. Decision makers now need to be approached in a different way, attract rather than distract them, get them on your side, build a level of trust and become an influencer rather than a follower in your market. The inbound marketing methodology is about attracting the customer to your website, to pull them in, rather than push them away with an interruptive style of communication that may suit your needs but not your audience. Work on a strategy with your ideal customer as the focus and work hard at understanding what they want and how you can tap into their pain or opportunity by providing educational information in the form of content marketing. How you do that we will address another day! CEO Kennedy Andersson AB-www.kennedyandersson.com