Social Media Marketing

When does social media genuinely drive sales?

For five kinds of business, social media does real commercial work rather than acting as a shop window. It is worth being honest about whether you are one of them.

• Visual consumer products. Jewellery, food, homeware, fashion, anything where seeing it is most of the sale. Instagram and Pinterest do real work here.
• Local consumer services. Where a community following converts into bookings — salons, restaurants, gyms, venues. These businesses usually get more from social when it runs alongside being found in the map pack rather than instead of it.
• Businesses with a genuine personality behind them. A founder or a team that people follow because of who they are rather than what they sell. This cannot be manufactured by an agency writing posts in your name.
• Recruitment. Often the highest return social use for a growing business, and rarely the one anyone plans for.
• B2B where LinkedIn is genuinely where your buyers are. Real for some sectors, assumed for many more.

Which platforms are worth it for a UK trade or B2B business?

For most trade and B2B companies, LinkedIn and a tidy, accurate Facebook page earn their place and the rest usually do not — unless the work photographs well or you are hiring. Here is the platform-by-platform version, including the cases where the honest answer is no.

What does a month of social media management actually involve?

Planning against what the business is actually doing, getting the raw material out of you, writing, designing, scheduling, replying to what comes back, reporting on it, and a review at the end of the month where the things that are not working get dropped.

• Planning against what you are actually doing. A month built around real events — a job finishing, a new van, an apprentice starting, a piece of kit arriving — rather than around a calendar of national days. That means a short conversation at the start of the month about what you are working on right now, which takes ten minutes and changes everything downstream.
• Getting the assets out of you. This is the part that fails. Photographs from site, a thirty-second clip, the name of the thing in the picture. We chase, and there is a limit to what chasing achieves. The same photographs usually earn their keep on the pages the website needs them for too, which makes the chasing easier to justify.
• Writing. Captions in your voice, using the words your customers use rather than the words your industry uses. Longer on LinkedIn, shorter on Instagram, and different again where a post is really a recruitment advert wearing a different hat.
• Design. Cropping and setting each image for the format it is going into, and building a graphic where there is no photograph worth using. A badly cropped photograph does more damage than most people expect, because it reads as carelessness about the work itself.
• Scheduling and publishing. Queued ahead rather than posted in a panic, with anything that has to go out on the day left manual. Scheduling is the easiest part of the job and the part most often sold as though it were the whole job.
• Replying. Comments, direct messages, the occasional complaint — answered within a sensible time and passed to you when the answer is something only you know, such as a price, a date, or whether you cover that postcode.
• Watching where the traffic goes. Profile visits, link clicks, and what happens to those clicks when they land. A profile link pointing at a homepage that answers nothing wastes the only genuine click social gives you.
• Reporting. Followers and engagement, plus profile visits, link clicks and any enquiry that can reasonably be attributed to social, with the caveats stated rather than buried in a footnote.
• The monthly review, where things get dropped. A format that is not working stops. A platform that is not working stops. This is the conversation most retainers quietly avoid, because dropping a platform usually means dropping part of the fee with it.

How do you plan social media content that will actually get made?

Start from the raw material you can really supply, group it into three or four recurring themes, and plan a month ahead with a named person who approves each batch. A plan built on content that never arrives collapses within weeks, however good the calendar looks.

• Audit what already exists. Photographs from completed jobs, product shots, team pictures, customer messages, the answers you give on the phone every week. Most businesses own more usable material than they think, and it is better than anything bought.
• Choose three or four recurring themes. For a trade firm that might be finished work, the people, how something is done and a useful tip. Themes make a month fill itself and stop the blank-page panic that ends most retainers.
• Plan against real events. A job finishing, a new vehicle, an apprentice starting, a delivery arriving. Calendars of national awareness days produce generic posts that every competitor is also publishing.
• Set a collection routine that costs the business almost nothing. A shared folder, a phone note, a weekly message asking for three photographs. The rule is that supplying material must be easier than not supplying it.
• Agree who approves, and how quickly. One named person, one batch per week or fortnight. In sectors where claims are constrained, such as healthcare, approval also means your own compliance lead reading each post before it goes out.
• Keep a small reserve of evergreen posts. When a fortnight produces nothing, the reserve keeps the schedule alive. Reuse good material in a different format rather than inventing filler.
• Connect the content to your site. Posts that point to a useful page, and pages that turn that click into an enquiry, do more than posts that point nowhere. Social is the shop window and the site is where the sale actually happens.