NEW MEDIA TIPS

When and How Often To Post on Social Media

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I stumbled on this post and thought it useful for everyone who has a thing or two with the Social media space;; managing accounts or marketing brands and products.

One of the most challenging aspects of social media marketing is knowing when and how often to post. Organic posts are most challenging because you are relying on the algorithms to show your content to the right people. If your post isn’t relevant or appealing, people won’t interact with it and it will get pushed down in the news feed.

To ensure that your posts get as much attention as possible, CoSchedule did some research that the rest of us can learn from. Below is more information about when and how you should schedule your social content. For a visual look, check out the full article from CoSchedule.

Facebook

Facebook continues to be the most popular social network, with over 2 billion monthly active users. To show how successful Facebook is, consider some of the latest financials. In 2016, earnings were at $7.01 billion in Q3 alone. For all of 2014, earnings were at $12.47 billion. Facebook’s stock-to-market valuation exceeds $245 billion, which is more than Walmart.

To get your brand noticed, it’s recommended to make one post a day from 1-4pm. Any more than this, and you may look spammy to your followers. Posts can be curated or reshared every other day. For more information on how Facebook’s algorithm works, check out our previous post on 2018 Facebook News Feed Updates.

Twitter

Twitter may not have as large of a following as Facebook, but users are loyal. The social network has 330 million monthly active users and 500 million tweets sent a day. Despite concerns over Twitter’s decline in popularity, the financials are strong. Q3 2016 revenue was $616 million compared to Q3 2015’s revenue of $569 million.

One benefit to Twitter is that you have more flexibility with how often you can post. It’s recommended to tweet 15 times a day, with retweets and curated posts accounting for seven posts. The hours are flexible as well, with the best times being 2-3am, 6-7am, 9am-3pm, 5-6pm and 9-10pm.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most popular professional social network, with 500 million monthly active users. In Q3 2016, LinkedIn generated $960 million in revenue, which may not be that surprising considering that 41% of millionaires use the professional network.

To stand out on LinkedIn, your posts must be thoughtful and strategic. Only one post a day is recommended, otherwise, you may look desperate and insincere. The best times to post are between 10-11am, with the option to curate or reshare posts every other day. To make things easier for you, keep Facebook and LinkedIn on the same schedule: one post a day, curated posts every other day.

What do you think about these “best” times? Does one work better for you than another?

How to Successfully Run a Blog

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When it comes to creating, owning or managing a blog, whether you write for money, popularity or as your passion might not be very significant, but one thing every blogger, writer or website publisher will agree to is that they write because they want someone to read.

While a few of us post stories and leave it at the mercy of Google to dump it on the computers of global readers across the world, some others endeavour to publicize using social media platforms. Option (B) works especially for those who have a robust social media presence.

Meanwhile, for those who depend solely on option (B) above, writing great articles and making them available through your social media platform may not just be enough if the platform, your blog, itself refuses to play its role.

However, besides all of these, we are going to be talking about some salient things to do with your blog that would help improve your blog traffic and as much keep readers coming back.

1. BLOG TEMPLATE/ DESIGN

It is pertinent that you carefully choose your design from the various samples provided by Google's Blogger Team. So you have to work on the design. Choose a clean template that doesn’t confuse the visitors. In addition to that, be sure to feature your most popular posts in a separate section.

The About page is very important, as well as adding your Google+ account which enables you to build followers early enough.

2. NEXT IS BEING SOCIAL!

Now being able to share your blog post on Social media comes next because mere dependence on only Search Engines (SE) may not generate enough traffic for you.

The majority are familiar with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Of all, Facebook and LinkedIn do well in generating traffic to your blog or website. Other platforms only help in the publicity that the blog pr website needs. One of that is Twitter.

Many Twitter users will only retweet (RT) or favourite your post as an acknowledgement. Yet you need them to register the presence of your blog.

3. CAVE A NICHE

What this simply means is that you should endeavour to be different from the crowd. There are too many News Blogs out there. Don't dive into the sea of News blogs and start struggling to put your feet on ground. Even if you do, your head might be buried in the sea.

From research, when you pay attention to one field of study, it enables you study and also expand your scope of knowledge in that direction.

If you can be different and be consistent, you would soon be identified as an authority in that area. Typical example includes Linda Ikeji and Tolu Ogunlesi.

It does not matter what you are writing on, just endeavour to be specific and consistent. For instance, if a person get's tips on how to start a gas burner from your blog, be sure same person(s) are likely to come back for how to out the fire.

The same goes for when a person learns how to be genuinely born again from your blog because you post religious contents, same person(s) may also come back to learn to stay happy with God without the burden of religiosity.

In essence, sticking to a particular niche is one of the most important ways to make your blog popular.

4. ADD SHARING BUTTONS

Almost everyone who use the internet usually have their social media accounts open while they do other things. Thus, make sure you add a button for readers to share your posts. Just like twitter fans retweet, blog or website audience like to express their love for a particular post by sharing it. Then make it easy for them to share because as they do, they are publicizing your blog.

5. ALWAYS USE TAGS

Often times than usual, bloggers post stories but forget to use tags. What tags do is that they help position your story or article for search engines. You may not remember to use tags but Google will always remember to check for it while people attempt to crawl blogs or websites.

There are many more tips on improving your blog or website. you may suggest a few too.

Having issues with implementing any of these? Check my contact below this page. Thanks

Quick tools for social media managers

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Being a Social Media Manager could either be fun or tedious considering how one does the job.

Meanwhile, from my side of the world, I bet Social Media is fun for work when you know a couple of multimedia tools to make work easier (point of correction, I didn't say the case is similar everywhere in Nigeria).

These tools may not be the essentials things you need to get your work done faster on your social media platforms, they only help better illustrations of your intended information to your audiences.

Using these tools to tell your stories or to portray the organisation you represent makes it friendlier for readers to relate and also remember the story you are telling.

Some of these tools include Timeline JS3, Storymap, and Riddle.

I am going to talk about these three even when there are more tools. However, permit me to state here that these tools are better when used on Google Chrome browsers because of saving your content in Google drive.

To start with, Timeline JS3 is the recent version of the product. It is a tool that enables you to narrate incidence in sequence according to the period those events took place. For instance, I did this on the abducted Chibok Girls in Nigeria when it was about 365 days of their no return.

You can imagine how much information I had on the abduction after one year and how difficult that would seem for me to tell all that took place within the region in the Northern part of Nigeria based on insurgency as well as peaceful protests held by NGOs and campaigners.

Somewhat similar to this is Storymap. It is used to tell your stories in a very friendly manner. It includes the use of locations.

For storymap, you can map out areas where your offices are located to your clients in a very friendly and interactive manner.

You could as well map out areas of interest to visitors of your blog or website. This map is called a story map because it helps you tell your stories with few words but more of interactive multimedia contents.

The last for this session is Riddle. Riddle is a tool that helps you put up a quick poll or survey which is good to engage you readers or site viewers especially on trending topics or topics of interest.

Sometimes, you need to remind your viewers or clients of things that happened in the far past which are yet significant today. Please not that Riddle is not the only poll or survey tool, there are a couple of others, but this is seemingly the most user friendly of all,

Using these for social media content creation will help transform your career for good. Note that you would o more be contented with just sharing stories on Social Media and be called a Social Media Manager. No, there is more to do.

Till we meet again, I am David Lawal,
Digital Media Executive,