Kerry Watkins: Social media tips to help market you business

The world of social media never stands still. There have been several major changes over the past few months which could impact how you market your business. What can your business do to stay ahead of the curve?
Kerry Watkins from Social BrightonKerry Watkins from Social Brighton
Kerry Watkins from Social Brighton

1) Invest in video content

After the recent Facebook Newsfeed algorithm change in January, many businesses found it harder to reach their page fans. Disappointing from a marketing point of view, but Facebook is trying to improve the user experience so we should remain positive. It’s still imperative to share quality content that appeals to your audience if you want to reach your fans and make an impact. However, at present, businesses tend to reach more people using video and live streaming. Video content is extremely popular with audiences across all networks and tends to achieve higher engagement and click through rates.

2) Use Facebook Groups to engage your community

By improving group features, Facebook is helping to make groups a great place for building community and engagement. Group admins can now easily publish new member welcome posts, add admin badges to the group management team and use the new insights to help you grow engagement, knowing when your members are online.

3) Invest time in using Instagram

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Instagram has been testing a few new features recently, the most interesting of which include shoppable posts: linking product tags in posts to online stores, and a new regram functionality, allowing people to easily share content as well as liking and commenting. It could be worth investing time now in building your Instagram audience, as the future looks bright for this network.

4) Save your Stories on Instagram

Many businesses are already using Instagram Stories to create and share content that successfully connects with new audiences but, as stories disappear after just 24 hours, some businesses felt the investment in time was risky. But the new ‘Stories Highlights’ feature allows you to create highlight packages of your stories, making them available for all eternity (or until you want to delete them). With the new archives section, you can even go back to old stories and add them to your Highlights.

5) Tweet more!

Twitter has doubled the number of characters to tweet with. It’s an opportunity to share more, to be creative with your tweets. Oh, and enjoy the new Twitter image cropping, which they’ve implemented based on machine learning to identify the important parts of your images!

Kerry Watkins from Social Brighton is leading two Bite-sized Learning training events for Brighton Chamber in March and April; design using Canva and an Instagram masterclass.

For more information about Brighton Chamber training and networking events, visit: www.businessinbrighton.org.uk/events