The number one social media mistake most businesses make is spending too much time online. This means social media is cutting into company hours while potentially causing employee burn out. In order to avoid this path, it’s recommended that each business creates a social media content strategy.

Here’s how:

1. Determine the goal

In order to properly leverage social media, you need to set specific goals along with timelines to meet them. Remember, your goals and timelines need to be clear to your entire team. Keep this in mind, too: your goals should have the ability to be measured.

For example, convert 10 sales within 30 days on Facebook by posting 1x daily with a clear call-to-action.

The more specific your goals are, the easier it’ll be for your company to achieve results.

2. Identify your target audience

Using the available tools on social media to help your company learn about who is following you is the first place to start. Find out who these people are, where they’re coming from, when they’re logging on, and what they’re clicking on. It’s all valuable information.

The more you can find out about your audience, the better you’ll understand what they’re looking for, so that you can serve them.

3. Choose the best content

The best type of content to post depends on the type of service or product your company provides. For example, if you’re a  service-oriented business, share pictures or videos of people happily or effectively using your service.

One thing to steer clear of is sharing posts unrelated to your business or from a competitor. If there is something you find valuable and want to share, find a way to tie it to your business to show thought leadership.

4. Vary your content

The format of your content is different from the type of content you post. We recommend that you use a lot of variety in your content including: videos, pictures, articles, podcasts, and more.

Different content will lead to different types of engagement with your audience.

Treat this like A/B testing; see if you get more responses on Twitter versus Facebook versus Instagram, or comments on a blog post, etc.

5. Decide which platforms to use

Even though there are a lot of different social media platforms available, it does not make them all ideal for your business. Be strategic and focus on where your audience is to gain meaningful engagement and save you time.

Make your time count

Create a plan now and it’ll save you time in the long run. Outlining your goals clearly, identifying your audience, and creating the best optimized content, will put your business on the right track to start  seeing results.

Caring for your website goes beyond clean SEO and fresh content. Here’s why your company site needs ongoing attention and maintenance:

First Impressions

Website maintenance is the key to ensuring that visitors have a great interaction with your brand.
It also helps protect your data and boost your overall SEO score.

Website maintenance also helps improve your brand’s reputation and overall customer experience and ensures that site visitors can find what they’re looking for as soon as possible.

Customer Experience

It’s important that you’re taking the steps to improve a visitor’s experience on your website. Remember that a click on your website is often the very first interaction that a potential customer has with your brand.

Small problems like a slow page loading time, broken links, 404 errors, and even outdated content can cause visitors to click away from your site quickly and even prevent them from returning later.

Test your website for a fast loading time, take a look at your analytics, and don’t forget to renew your domains. Website maintenance tools can check out the plugins your website uses and ensures that any forms are working properly. It can even crawl user comments on your posts for potential spam.

All these efforts will help ensure a greater customer experience while on your site.

Consistency is Key

You’ll need to constantly update and maintain your website to guard against new threats, ensure that your data is backed up, and more.

Website maintenance also works to ensure that potential vulnerabilities are identified and that any holes in your security strategy are quickly plugged up.

Even if your website does become the victim of a cyber-attack, proper maintenance can mitigate the damage and help you to get back online again as soon as possible.

Conquer with Content

Website maintenance can have a huge impact on your rankings, too.

Every time you update your website, from adding new links to an old post to even fixing a few spelling errors, you tell Google that you’ve added new content.

Consistently uploading new content to your website will help boost your SEO score.

This is because search engines assume that you’re providing more relevant and up-to-date content than a site that was last updated a month ago.

The more content that you give Google and other search engines, the more likely your website will show up in everyday search results.

Keeping your website up-to-date, maintaining fresh and exciting content, and making sure it is running efficiently serves your business and its ongoing success. Put these practices to work on an ongoing basis and your website will be your number one tool for advertising and promoting your business.