6 Social Media Best Practices You Probably Aren’t Doing (And Should)

With the constantly changing social media landscape, it’s hard to keep up with trends.

There are a lot of hugely beneficial and fairly simple social media best practices in which brands and individuals should be participating, but most people simply don’t know about them. Social moves at such a high speed, that it can be difficult – and for some, even tedious – to keep up. So, with that in mind, these are a few of the more valuable things that most people should know about when it comes to social.

Leveraging Employee Advocacy

For brands, something that often goes overlooked is the fact that your first set of brand advocates is much closer than you might think. Within any company, there exists an entire workforce of prospective brand advocates. It’s important to take advantage of the opportunity that comes from leveraging this audience.

While a best practice would not be requiring that your employees share your content (in fact, this would like backfire in an extraordinary fashion) it is certainly wise to consider adopting an internal culture whereby employees are invited to share content, create content and involve themselves with the brand on social media. It might surprise you to see how much faster your audience can grow when capitalizing on this opportunity.

Taking Advantage of LinkedIn

For most people, LinkedIn is seen as nothing more than a large network in which to share your virtual resume. The truth of the matter is that LinkedIn offer a tremendous amount of opportunity if you are using all of its features.

First of all, LinkedIn’s rich media feature (shown in the image below) allows users to integrate much more than a simple resume. You can link videos, upload images and a little further down, showcase some of your publications. It is really a one stop shop for every bit of professional exposure you have received.

Screenshot taken 5/2/2014

It’s also important to take advantage of Groups on LinkedIn. Whether you are an individual or a business owner looking to increase your personal or brand exposure, LinkedIn Groups can do wonderful things. Take note of the groups that are meant for discussion, and those that are meant for articles, and build a content strategy on LinkedIn that you see resonating with your audience.

Use Google+…A Lot

It’s still surprising that so many people ignore Google+. On the personal side, Google Authorship is an outstanding way to increase your content’s exposure. For the brand side, sharing content to your Google+ Circles and Google+ Communities that generates clicks and +1s is a more powerful practice than virtually any other when it comes to SEO. And that’s SEO in total, not just SEO with regards to social signals.

Source: Searchmetrics. 2013 US Search Ranking Factors.

Write About Your Competitors (in a Good Way)

If you go to Google and type in “Best Social Media Listening Tools” one of the first items that pop up is an article from monitoring tool Brandwatch. The thing is that this isn’t a page on the Brandwatch site that talks about how it is the best tool in the marketplace. It is actually a blog post wherein they list ten competitors that offer free social media listening capabilities and do it quite well.

Often, business owners are afraid of touting competitors. After all, why would you recommend a competitors products when you are trying to reap the business for yourself. But people respond to useful information, not self promotion. If you’re an ad agency, you have a far better chance of having an article seen that showcases the ten best commercials of the year rather than a simple case study that features your own work.

A mix of the two is an important component of any strong content strategy and content marketing campaign.

Use a Suite of Technologies to Help You Execute a Strategy

There is no such thing as the perfect tool. People are looking for it, some applications claim that they have created it, but the reality is that to really execute a strategy effectively, you’re going to need a suite of technologies to help you.

Evaluate different tools that offer different services and see which ones will a) provide you with the greatest value and b) work well in conjunction with one another. It’s better to have several tools doing each task exceptionally well than one tool that is mediocre at everything.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the social media best practices you might not have known about. Considering the fast nature of the evolution of social media, no one can be expected to know everything. But as you try to build out your brand – whether it is your personal or professional brand – these are a few of the items you might have overlooked.

Can you think of other social media best practices that are not all that well known? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!