Social Media Tips

1. All social media platforms should ideally be professionally branded the same as the website to reinforce the branding and have a consistent, familiar approach.
2. Social media channels are an opportunity to engage with and build a following with a wider audience of influencers, as well as key decision makers.
3. Use social media to drive traffic to your website
4. Build an audience of useful followers who can be targeted directly through social media communications . i.e. announcements of new cranes and their features, prestigious project, business successes etc
5. it is worth considering methods to incentivise users to contribute content e.g.. best photo competitions with a prize – in our experience this doesn’t have to be an expensive prize, we have used branded t shirts with a natty / appropriate message, umbrellas and iPad for clients who were feeling particularly generous. Competitions should be promoted by other channels – website news, e marketing and e signatures etc
6. It is important to develop a clear plan of how the social media channels are to be used, in terms of what the content is going to be and how will you engage the audiences. Consider carefully what are the desired outcomes, share the responsibility of generating content but provide clear guidelines.
7. Encourage and ideally incentivise your followers to generate useful content that you can use and recycle – for example photos and videos of projects entered into a competition – these can be retweeted and recycled , plus used on the main website for case studies etc.
8. Make sure you follow your followers back – monitor what they are publishing and tweeting on a regular basis – so that you can like and retweet, link to etc.
9. Related to the above point it is important to follow you major customers and suppliers – so that you can recycle and use their content , which help to reinforce your market credibility .
10. You need to monitor the different channels on a regular basis – typically this requires 30 mins a day.
11. The website will be linking to these, and social media has a big impact on search engine performance now, if you link back to the website.
12. In addition to twitter and facebook, it is important to have a good presence on You Tube with video content as this is the second largest search engine after Google and greater weight is placed on video content than image and text on website.

We often say to clients there are now 3 important pillars for good search engine performance – website content , video and social media.