Social Media Tips from a Millennial
It’s hard to explain social media to someone who hasn’t been directly interacting with it since the early days of html coding your MySpace page. It’s difficult to put to words exactly what you need to do as well since every company is different and markets to different people. Your content needs to blend in with the scroll but be entertaining enough for further investigation and your responses need to be fast and conversational.
I don’t know many things but here are the things that I know for sure…
Timing Matters
Publishing content when your audience is online will always bring better organic engagement
To find your peak posting times for Facebook go to
page —> insights —> posts
From here you can see that I have a captive audience around 6:00 AM, 9:00 AM, and 6:00 PM, with 6:00 PM being my most valuable time to post.
2. Don’t Post and Ghost
You’re likely to get your most questions and responses right after you post at a peak time. It’s important to be ready to respond and engage with your customers immediately to increase the likelihood they’ll respond and create further engagement for your post.
I wear this like a badge of honor. It shows my audience that they can get their questions answered quickly and increases the likelihood of an inquiry in the first place.
Let me put it this way…
We have phones for a reason, when you get a message respond to it. Your potential or current customer is online now and wants to know the answer ASAP, taking 5 minutes out of your evening to reply really does make a difference for the customer and for your algorithm.
When you actively start engaging with your customers, creating content for them becomes a lot easier. Ask questions and get real life accounts of how your audience is using your product or service. Having these real world conversations not only provides your company with a more intimate relationship with its audience, it allows you to do what social media was intended for… BEING SOCIAL!
3. Gifs are the Secret Sauce to Online Communication
This one might be against everything you’ve ever read about effective social media marketing but trust me, where words fail… gifs speak.
There is a GIF for every occasion
Someone made a comment that is true but you’re technically not allowed to talk about it (ie: “X brand is definitely not as good as you”)
A customer gives you unsolicited advice about how to run your business… you don’t want to welcome even more commentary but you want them to know they’ve been heard
My GIF Rules
Never use a gif to insult your audience
Avoid using gifs containing:
Political members
Criminals or cancelled celebrities (no Bill Cosby or Tom Cruise)
Use gifs that look like you (as a white cis woman, I try not to use BIPOC gifs… this could be a whole other blog honestly…)
Offensive language (I try not to use gifs with words either, they’re supposed to convey an emotion not an exact response)