Funnel readers to your site
How many different social platforms are you managing (for your organization) currently? Do you have a private online community? Are you on Facebook? If so, is your organization represented by a business page that one or several of your employees administers or did you set it up as a person? Do you add status updates on LinkedIn in the same tone that you use on Twitter? Do you have different roles for each of your public facing platforms? Do you redirect traffic from your public platforms to your private member community or does it depend what message you’re delivering to the social world? Too many questions? Does your head hurt?
We’ve talked about social media strategy before here and here as well as content strategy. We even suggested questioning your strategy on a regular basis but have you given thought to using your various social platforms for different purposes? Here’s how we break ours out:
Facebook. Facebook has an enormous audience. As a business catering to member-centric organizations, a large percentage of Facebook users have no interest in what we provide. But some will. So we use our Facebook page to post blogs, share funny images, upload company pictures — a somewhat lighter side of what we do on our company page. It’s still us, the same brand, the same tone with the same goals.
Twitter. YourMembership.com’s Twitter feed is used for information dissemination and conversation. We share links of articles and industry news. We participate in Twitter chats and spend a lot of time listening. We’re not the most vocal, averaging between 2 to 6 tweets a day, but we have very large ears.
LinkedIn. We have both a company profile and a group. We post on occasion, focusing mainly on company and industry information. We spend time in the questions and answers sections and our employees are active in several LinkedIn groups (on a personal level).
Blog. We post on our blog on a consistent basis and use a casual tone. We employ personal stories a lot to help illustrate points. However, an integral part of blogging is about reading what other bloggers are sharing. Don’t forget that when hammering out a blog strategy. Reading other people’s blogs is so rewarding and setting aside time to do so will improve your writing and content as well.
That’s just a little bit about what we do and how we differentiate between platforms. This differential helps us stay organized and find a place for all content without everything looking the same to our audience. Have fun with the different uses or personalities of your pages but one note of caution: your page “personality” should never differ so much from your organization’s voice that it would cause a visitor to wonder if she has the right organization. However, customizing your content to fit the social network’s audience is a good idea. If you want more explanation into how we do things, feel free to follow or like us and we can
What practices do you have in place? How are you reaching your audience? Are there any platforms you use that we didn’t mention or are there some you’ve found ineffective in reaching your audience?
