Anyone who has ever had to plan or execute a social strategy knows how difficult it can be to keep up with the constantly changing social media landscape. Social media networks constantly release new features. It’s crucial to differentiate passing industry trends from those that can drive growth.

This post will show you the significant benefits of investing in a social media strategy. You’ll find out how to create a social media strategy to drive substantial traffic to your site if you read the entire article.

This article will discuss how social media made our website and blog 230% more popular each month.

Social Media Was Born in No Man’s Land

Social media is the new convergence of customer support and marketing. It is a tool that can be used to support both sales and support.

Hubstaff was beginning to do very little in this area. Although we had an advertising specialist who was very good at social advertising, he couldn’t do much without great content.

The blog was my favorite thing in which I was involved. Each blog post I published was to be shared on social media using the Buffer app.

This meant that our content was dominating our social media channels (not biased and completely credible, right?) Instead of finding great, relevant information all over the internet. It was nearly the same thing to visit our Facebook and Twitter pages as our blog homepage.

People were reaching out via social media to our page, which was a big mistake. Apart from trying to broadcast blog posts, our page was quite quiet and had the personality of an old snail. When a visitor visited our pages, instead of clicking the like or follow buttons, they would see our boring content and bounce.

Collecting data and establishing guidelines

Although I have managed social media pages in the past, I wasn’t a strategist. I wrote content and set it up to go out on social media. I had never dealt with analytics, social editorial calendars, guidelines, or any other similar issues.

Many of my team members were able to see what I was doing. The first month I let spam pass because I didn’t know where it was on our Facebook page. I continued to post like an automated bot and made other embarrassing errors.

During the transition, I created a few guidelines to guide me and others who may be dealing with our social media pages.

The first was a response guideline document that covered how to respond to questions on our social media profiles. To help me adjust my writing, I did a tone and vocal exercise. To make sure that I did not forget anything, I created a social media checklist.

My main goals were:

• Reply to 99% of mentions on Twitter or Facebook

• All spam comments and posts on our Facebook page must be deleted

• Use our social media channels to send out relevant, interesting, and useful content

For the first few months, I was responsible for our social media strategy. I was more reactive than proactive. This changed after we received professional advice from a social-media consultant.

Consulting

Our social media consultant is exceptional at what she does. The consulting session with her helped to shape our new strategy for social media. She pointed out the areas where we did well and needed to improve.

Expert feedback is highly recommended for anyone who has more specific needs with their social media strategy or simply doesn’t have experience with it.

Here are the key points from our session with the consultant

Do not show features, but benefits

Our social media pages “About” section was not designed for customers but us. Although our description described the company and what it did, it didn’t address how we could help potential customers.

We make remote employee management and tracking simple with our time-tracking software which includes screenshots and activity levels.

The new description, which is still in development, now states: “Increase remote team productivity and make team managing a breeze with accurate tracking of time, screenshots, and GPS tracking.

Useful tip: Always keep the customer at the center of your attention.

Quality over quantity

Facebook was too full of links and I was posting way too many posts. Our engagement rate was low and we were just throwing information at our followers, without actually having conversations with them. If we had a low engagement, then our updates would begin to appear less frequently in our followers’ news feeds. This would lead to a vicious circle.

It’s fine to share links, but people must click away from our social media pages to gain any value. Instead of engaging with people via our social media pages, we redirect traffic to pages that aren’t ours.

Instead of posting multiple times per day on Facebook, I reduced my posts to just one per day. Twitter was more flexible with my posting schedule, but I rarely posted more than six tweets per day (excluding @ mentions).

Diversifying the content I posted was also something I did. Canva was my tool to create images I could share on Facebook or Twitter. This provided value for our followers, without them needing to travel anywhere else.

Use it as an actionable tip to increase your engagement. Post once or twice per day and don’t force your viewers to go elsewhere for value.

Be interesting

It’s easier said than done, I know. In our case, we were bored. I chose professionalism because that is what social media can do. To inject personality into our social media pages, we started to focus on the unique things Hubstaff has that other companies don’t.

These are some of the things that I came up with.

• We have a 100% remote team, where team members share their opinions on time-tracking software and remote work productivity.

• We document our journey via our Growth Posts. These posts highlight our successes and failures on the journey to Hubstaff.

• Our team travels quite a bit. Our team travels all across America, Asia, Europe, and other parts of the world. It’s always fun to see what the team is doing in their team calendar or hear about their adventures on Slack.

I took blog posts that highlighted our unique view on remote work and turned them into images that I shared on our social networks.

I spoke out about our commitment to remote work and allowed people to see a bit more of our company culture. The image of Jared (our co-founder)at work was a hit on Twitter and Facebook.

I started sharing customer success stories and testimonials from our case studies. Hubstaff is always a pleasure to hear from customers. Sharing that information with our social media followers strengthened our brand and increased our credibility. 

In the future, I would like to upload photos of cool places where our team works.

Actionable tip – Get personal with your customers and share experiences and tips that are unique to your brand.

I was able to use the consultant’s suggestions as a guideline for improving our social media marketing companies in Phoenix efforts. I started responding to every tweet with GIFs (more later), tagging relevant people and companies on Twitter and Facebook, and initiating conversations with our followers.

I spent more time thinking about what I was sharing and the engagement rates have increased. I also love how funny our fellow brands (and followers) can be.

Our current social media strategy focuses on personality and value

Our communication is more human. I respond to every tweet I receive and I read them all. The exceptions are tweets from trolls and tweets that make no sense. I also have three alert levels so that I don’t miss any mentions of us that weren’t tagged. These are done with Google Alerts, Notify, Mention, and Notify.

GIFs are a joy to use when managing Hubstaff’s social media accounts.

Now, we place a greater emphasis on customer satisfaction. We have connected our Intercom and Facebook accounts so that all messages sent to us via Facebook go directly to our support team. This means that technical questions I cannot answer go directly to the people who can. It cuts out the middleman and allows us to get answers faster.

Our strategy is constantly evolving. Scaling and growing is a process of trial and error. We are observing our audience to see what they like, what they use, and what content they enjoy.

What I Learned

Social media is no longer a way to reach your target audience. It has become a tool for building relationships and providing value. It was a new medium that I had never seen its full potential when I started to use it. Six months ago, I would not have seen more than a handful of people sharing our content and reaching out to us online every few days.