“Faith is essential in your success. Faith is needed in almost every area of our lives: work, projects, and small business endeavors,” – Alex Cook
Social media has changed everyone’s lifestyle, from the way we connect to people to the way we conduct business. Whatever state of mind you may be in, chances are you’ve shared it on Face-book. Whatever delectable food you stumbled upon, you’re tempted to post a picture of it on Insta-gram. When you’re too excited and can’t wait to share something you’re passionate about, you tweet it. And if you’re job hunting or want a career change, you must be in LinkedIn.
Whatever social media platform you may be using, you may want to read through the following tips below on how your business can most effectively carry and share your message and visuals across:
1. Relevance – read, read and read. Yep, you read that thrice. You have to be sure that your mes-sage is targeted to your desired audience. This means that your content should not only be timely but relevant and substantial, as well. While millennials are more visual, they also appreciate inter-esting, relatable and concise content.
2. Tasteful Graphics – Netizens have evolved into visual people wherein what they see matters. Graphics should be as minimal as possible but conveys the message in a way that is easy to com-prehend. Note: choose your fonts wisely.
3. Substance – relevance is not enough to win the social media game. Your readers must not feel they’re not wasting their precious time in reading what you shared. It has to matter to them. Em-ployers who are part of Generation X should adjust their communications strategies to appeal to their target so that their messages sent across more effectively. This also ensures a smoother working relationship.
4. Post Timing Wizard – this one is pretty straightforward. You can’t post a good morning message at 8pm.
5. Know your audience – treat social media as a war. And as in every war, you have to know your enemy (well your audience in this case). You have to study their online habits, what they like, when and where they use social media apps and even their buying habits. In this way, you can make re-latable content.
6. Ethical hashtagging – #you #cant #just #hashtag #anything how about that? Really annoying, right? Hashtagging is used so your post can be discovered by more people. Keep it simple. Main keywords of the thought you want to share will do. 3-5 hashtags is decent.
7. Post Frequency Discipline – posting your thoughts all at the same time makes no sense unless you want to be tagged as spam. Discipline yourself and keep it 15-30mins apart. Also, do not post more than 5 times a day (Facebook and Instagram at least) unless you are live posting an event (ask yourself if you’re a brand ambassador or just plain annoying)
8. Identifying Platforms – This is pretty simple. Twitter = Status/news/one sentence caption. Insta-gram = images/photographic thoughts/visuals. Facebook = shareable news and images as well as an album of your recent trip. Pinterest= think of art moodboards. You can upload your stuff but it’s not required since you’re just pinning.
9. Give credit – If it’s not yours, don’t forget to cite the original content creator as reference.
10. Be Dynamic – You can post GIFs in Facebook and Instagram – use it. GIFs stand for Graphics Interchange Format. These are the moving images hovering all over the Internet originally used to provide a touch of humor, to complement the internet memes and are now used even for advertis-ing and other platforms. When used appropriately, GIFs could be an interesting alternative to pho-tos and links. There are tons of content available in the information superhighway, by all means use it. Again, don’t forget to credit.
As expected, there are new and emerging social media platforms such as Periscope, owned by Twitter that broadcasts your live feed to your audience; Snapchat where you can post your photos and set how long can your friends or employees can see it; Vine where you can share video snip-pets.
Enjoy the social media ride but always keep in mind that effective sharing comes only next to being a good, responsible netizen.
The best that you could do, with your social media skills, is to use it as an opportunity to connect and engage with your customers and as a platform to share the Good News.
The worst that social media could do to you is that you fall into a trap of “addiction” and that you spend more time on it that doing Godly things.
Social media could also be a trigger for narcissism or immense love for self, or in this case, your business. This is why we have to be constantly reminded by the Biblical passage in 2 Timothy 3:2, “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy” and make social media platforms avenues for being good, sharing good and doing good.
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