The currency of social media is the share. – Courtney Seiter
Another #rainybrandingtuesday! I had the pleasure to address a group of translation students in Castellón last Friday, to talk branding and other things I love.
Rainy London en la UJI
One of the many topics was why market your services to be visible is so important and that linked back to the relevance of social media – and their feature of “free”. As I repeat all the time, you do have to invest time on your social media but if you plan savvily, it’s not that taxing after all. The question one student asked me was indeed “How much time should I spend on social media for marketing purposes?” and then he fired back straight after, asking “How much time do YOU spend using them”? I laughed as my free time is spent equally living and then, well, checking my social media so I can’t say I’m the best example of how many hours you should or should not spend 🙂 But then I explained how you can plan it all. Great content is king – and we have discussed about it in the past – but it has to be shared with the right audience in the right moment or it runs the risk of going unnoticed. How?
You have to create a distribution strategy.
As read on Buffer’s blog, these are some of the ways you can share content.
The channels are endless
You just need to find out when. This article summarises perfectly the right times to share content. You can use Buffer, my favourite.
How Buffer works
And SocialBro helps you find out when to share. This list of tips is great and the one I like the most and find most useful is number 5:
Tip 5: Post with your audience in mind.
Who are they? If you’re marketing to young adults, they use Twitter in a very different way to a slightly older audience. For example, they’ll be more likely to Tweet at 2am than someone who needs to be up for work at 6am.
Where are they located? Pay attention to your market. If you’re UK-based and trying to attract a wider US audience, post at optimum times in the US to make sure they’re always seeing your Tweets, otherwise you mind find all your Tweets are lost in translation.
Think mobile. Twitter revealed 60% of their user base logged in via mobile devices at least once a month. Increasingly, users are using their phones to use Twitter rather than their desktop computers, so make sure your posts are optimized for mobile. Especially as 79% of mobile users are likely to browse Twitter several times a day… more chances for them to see your posts!
PLUS: check out his interesting infographics too to see at a glance the science of timing in action.
Attribution is key
So, to recap:
- plan ahead (how many posts or tweets etc a week)
- scout for content (you can produce your own or use Feedly to share interesting things)
- is it helpful?
- would people thank you for that?
- would you click on it yourself? – or: does it make you feel cool?
- would you email it to a friend?
- analyse your audience: if you work in communication, it’s likely that all events are by night or weekend, translators usually are working in an office time frame (even though it’s common to work during w-ends!)
- always make sure your attribution is there (you can use this WhoTweetedItFirst)
- check your statistics: you can see how many clicks and why (ps.: links and photos are great hooks)
Some food for thought:
- http://www.socialbro.com/blog/best-time-post-twitter
- https://blog.kissmetrics.com/science-of-social-timing-1/
- https://blog.bufferapp.com/a-guide-to-social-media-sharing-what-when-and-how
- http://www.fastcompany.com/3026897/work-smart/what-when-and-how-to-share-on-social-media
- http://socialtimes.com/attribution-still-important-even-social-media_b141427
Rainy London Branding 