Spring cleaning your Social: 5 priorities

Spring is here in the northern hemisphere, and for many children far and wide it means one thing: that time of year your parents make you do a proper spring clean of your bedroom.

It was that dreaded moment, as a kid, that you knew was coming every year. Would your parents really be cruel enough to make you spend a whole weekend scrubbing the walls and throwing out all those old t-shirts?

That got us thinking: could spring-time signal the right moment for you to get your social media house in order? And what would that look like? What does a recently spring-cleaned social media presence look like, and how should you approach it?

Here’s our pick of the top 5 priorities:

1. Revamp your profiles

Go after the low hanging fruit first and ensure your social profiles are optimized and reflect your brand well. Even if you’re not responsible for the organic posting and management of your social accounts, a particular ad might spark a user’s interest in your business as a whole, and lead them to check out your profile and potentially follow you. As a social advertiser, make sure the experience of your brand is consistent across all social touchpoints, and that your profiles are optimized.

Facebook

• Make sure your page’s cover photo is optimized. It’s like a first impression for your business profile, so use it to its full potential! Here are some best practices.
• Make full use of the CTA option at the top of your business page. With options ranging from Sign Up to Book Now to Contact Us, think about the best way to use this feature for your particular business.
• Provide complete company information. Providing up-to-date business information on your Facebook page can help build the impression of your brand as one that is professional and trustworthy. Also, think about adding links to the long description and Products sections. Make full use of these to drive traffic to your website or online store, and update them regularly throughout the year if you have new offers or promotions.
• Use Page Tabs. Go further than the default tabs and create your own custom tabs to steer your prospects and connections in the direction you want. Our client Birchbox is a great example – they’ve created custom tabs showcasing upcoming events, as well as links to their shop and other social accounts.

Instagram

• Turn your bio into a call-to-action. Your Instagram bio should achieve two main goals: communicate what your business does and show how a customer can find you. Take it to the next level by showcasing your brand’s personality and prompting action. Include a hashtag to encourage followers to submit content and expand your visibility, and test out using emojis in your bio, but only if they fit your brand.

Twitter

• Get your bio sorted. Take the same best practices from your Instagram bio. Just don’t go overboard on the hashtags, and think about avoiding industry-focussed hashtags, or you could be driving traffic to your competitors profiles.
• Optimize your cover image. Think about your header image lie a magazine cover. Change it monthly to match your business focus for that month. A tip for optimizing is to save the image file name with branded keywords to increase chances of being found in an image search.
• Open up your Twitter DM. Make your business more approachable and accessible on Twitter by changing the privacy settings for Direct Messages. Navigate to the Twitter settings page and click on the Privacy and Security tab. Scroll down, select the direct message option, and tick the box marked Receive Direct Messages from anyone.

2. Plan summer campaigns

After spring comes summer, so take this time to plan your summer social ad campaigns. Take into account the different buying habits and behaviour patterns associated with summer, as people head away on vacation or splurge during the summer sales period. For tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your summer social ad campaigns, Check out our latest eBook! It will give you all the information you need to take your summer ad campaigns to the next level, including detail on a series of different Facebook and Instagram ad formats and best-practices in using them.

Added to that, summer 2018 is a little different with the FIFA World Cup taking place in Russia from mid June! For millions of people, in literally every corner of the planet, the month-long competition means regular life goes on hold. And it represents a big opportunity for advertisers too – the 2014 FIFA World Cup inspired 1 billion Facebook interactions from over 220 million Facebook users. Here’s a bit more detail on how to tap into the buzz around the World Cup, and another article specifically around Twitter advertising during the tournament.

3. Analyze past results

As part of your social spring clean, take the time to analyse past results and identify areas of improvement. Compare various campaigns with the same objectives against each other, and even dive down into ad sets and the ad level itself. Here’s an article with more detail on what to look at for your Facebook ads activity.

If you’re a Paragone customer, make the most of our Helicopter View tool to generate cross-network reports of all your social ads activity on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Get better data visualization with multiple graphs, and even pull in external data from Google Analytics and other services.

4. Research new options

Once you’ve analyzed your social advertising results for the past year, for example, it might be time to look at new and innovative ways to go to the next level! Check out the latest ad formats in Instagram, for example, including ads in Instagram Stories. Keep abreast of new ad formats on Facebook, like ads in Facebook Stories. Look at your different options and test out advertising on Snapchat – who knows, you too could see the kinds of results that Mindshare and Warner Brothers did in our success story! The point is – take this opportunity to broaden your social advertising horizons. If you want to see better results in the months to come, it’s going to take a bit of innovation and trying out new things!

5. Re-evaluate goals/ rethink your strategy

Now could be a good time to take this research and step back again:

• What are you trying to achieve with your social advertising?
• What real-world, business outcome are you trying to drive?

Sometimes when you’re busy in the day-to-day work of setting up and optimizing campaigns, you can lose sight of the ultimate goal. Take a moment to consider where you want your business to be in 12 months time. Does your social ad strategy align with your business strategy as a whole? If not, realign it, put solid processes in place and go for it again!