Have you considered reviewing your own social feed from a third party perspective?

It’s not something that we think about but I’d suggest every so often you take the time to review it. You might be surprised by the results! Let’s take Twitter as an example – although the points raised are valid across the board.

Take a look at your business Twitter account and consider the following:

The basics

Does your profile photo accurately portray your company – Is it your logo or a photo of yourself? If it’s the latter, is it professional. Try not to post face shots from down the pub or similar.

Is your @username your business name, is your profile description accurate, does it have focused #hashtags relevant to your business and do you have a working website url?

Your tweets

This is quite possibly the most overlooked aspect of your account. Don’t forget that if someone is interested in your product/service they’re likely to click your profile and have a quick scroll through your recent tweets before making a decision whether to follow you or not.

So what do your tweets consist of? Well for starters your sales orientated tweets compared to your engagement tweets should be a ratio of 3:1. So ensure you’re not saturating your account with scheduled sales tweets. They have their place but should never be the overriding tweet type. You should actively seek engagement and #Norfolkhour can be a great way to do this you actively seek to generate conversation. Remember to listen, engage and share.

Animated gif overkill

There’s been a shift recently on Twitter to use animated gifs to visually convey an emotion or action in direct follower engagement and while this can be an interesting, fun addition to the existing mix of text and images – overuse can look unprofessional and misuse could damage your brand.

If you’re going to use animated gifs think very carefully about how they’re portraying your brand image, use them sparingly and most importantly consider if they’re really necessary? There’s nothing worse than seeing an account feed full of ‘generic’ animated gifs that distract from the product/service messages or announcements you’re trying to put across.

So what if you want to add a bit of ‘animation’ to your tweets? You could consider creating a series of your own animated gifs highlighting a sale or event, product/service feature, instructional content or emotion.

There’s a variety of desktop and smartphone based apps out there that you could use – one you could try is ‘Boomerang’ – it’s actually an additional Instagram app that allows you to record short animated gifs from short photo bursts and then save them to your photo stream or post straight to your Instagram, Facebook or Twitter feeds.

When to share

You should always use your discretion on this. Don’t blindly share other’s tweets until you’ve asked yourself – does this interest me, do I feel passionately about it and will it add value to those following me. Remember that your business Twitter account is your business so try to leave personal views for your personal Twitter account.

Summary

Regularly check your profile to ensure it’s up-to-date. Try to use relevant and brand specific photos/gifs, limit the use of ‘generic’ animated gifs/photos and most importantly pause to make sure the gif is actually relevant and needed.

Remember your social networks are still part of your business ‘shopfront’ so treat them with care and consideration and remember that they could be the first thing that a potential customer sees of your business – so try to make a good first impression.

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If you need more information or help on how Twitter could work for your business please get in touch with me at http://paulkirkdesign.co.uk or at @PKirk_designer

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