We often associate lent as a time to give up sugary foods, your caffeine addiction and for the bravest among us, chocolate. But why not use that time to kick some other bad habits too?
Research suggests it only takes 21 days to break a bad habit. So, with the 40 days and nights you have over lent, you’ll be able to make some big changes – and this year, we think you should focus on improving your social media activity.
Below are three bad practices that we see on social media every day and tips on how you can improve them.
Liking Your Own Updates
My personal number one pet peeve is seeing a business ‘like’ its own update on Facebook. Admittedly, Facebook has made this a very easy mistake to commit, however, it is also very easy to avoid – once you know how.
If you are a manager of a Facebook page and updates are shared by that page (either by yourself or another manager), they will appear in your news feed. By default, any interaction you have with the post will appear as if the business is interacting with the post.
See the images above. I have made Intergage like its own update (for demonstrative purposes only). This has happened because I am a manager and I have clicked ‘like’.
Should I want to ‘like’ this update from my personal profile, I need to click the drop down menu on the right and select my name. Therefore, any interaction I then have with the post will appear as myself. Simple!
![Intergage_MarketingJourney_Illustration11]()
Not Sharing Valuable Content
Not Sharing Valuable ContentIf you have ever been to one of my training courses, you will have heard me bang on about this before – but social media is a great way of getting high quality traffic to your website.
Therefore, to use social media for broadcasting your marketing message without providing a link to any valuable content on the subject matter is a waste of your energy, time and resources!
If you have a great deal you want to shout about, create a landing page or news article on your site. If you’ve recently won an award or expanded your team, share a blog post. If you’ve hosted an event, create a photo album. The list of opportunities for creating valuable content goes on.
Plain text posts with no links, photos or videos are going to massively underperform compared to a content rich post. Fewer users will interact with it; therefore, fewer users will see the post and less people will visit your website.
![Lent-blog-pic3]()
Not Optimising Your Posts
Not Optimising Your PostsWhen you share an update on any social network, it is as much of an art as it is a science. Thankfully, Facebook is slowly rolling out a new organic targeting tool to introduce a bit more science. In the meantime, here are a few tips which will help you make the most out of your updates.
- Keep your text to two lines – the less text there is, the more of it will be read.
- If you upload a link to Facebook or LinkedIn, wait for the link preview to load and then remove the URL – this makes the update look cleaner and shorter.
- Optimise the link preview by uploading a relevant picture, changing the headline and body of the text by simply clicking on it and editing before you share.
Training
If you would like to learn more about social media we offer a wealth of training courses, including Social Media Strategy and Facebook For Business. Book your place online or by calling 01202 684 009 to speak with a friendly member of our team.