Smart Cow Marketing

Best Practice: Social media image sizes [Infographic]

Having a consistent look and feel for images you produce provides the perfect solution for a digital marketing campaign. You can repurpose imagery across channels which helps to build your brand identity and therefore awareness and importantly it helps with ongoing engagement as your brand becomes familiar.

Repurposing images for social channels can help maintain consistency with your website. So think about creating a header image to be used across all social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, resize them for the respective channel. Our Infographic has a round up of some of the popular social channels and the images sizes that work.

Social Media Image Size Infographic

If you feel you need support in getting your business noticed on social media, then get in touch with Smart Cow Marketing to discuss your needs further.

Social media scrabble letters

Your 5 minute daily social media routine

For small business owners, running a business, managing finances, employees and new business takes time and a lot of effort. Marketing your products and services is just another key element to keep your brand front and centre of your clients and prospects and another activity that you need to juggle.

In this blog, we provide an overview of what you can do to conduct a mini audit of your social profile before taking up the challenge of conducting a 5-minute daily social media routine to help maintain and build on your brand awareness.

Social media audit

When was the last time you checked your social media profile on your business social platforms? Is it up to date? Is it clear what you do? Have you completed all you can – LinkedIn is great in highlighting how much of your profile is complete whether for your company or own personal profile.

Make sure your website address, email, telephone number visible and correct. On many social channels such as Facebook you can add in your opening times.  

Perhaps it’s also time to refresh your company bio. Keep it simple and get across what you do and whether you have any key areas of specialism to highlight.  

Which social media platforms are relevant to your business?

Take a moment to review your social channels. You may already be on Facebook and Instagram but what about a LinkedIn company profile? Including this activity in your social media strategy will help you concentrate your efforts moving forward.  

Conduct a little research with your customers to find out what channels are most popular. Also take a look at your competitors and see which channels they use. Check when they last posted as that can indicate how popular that channel has been for them.

Always have in the back of your mind who your target audience is to help you work out what channels are best and to ensure content is relevant.

5 minute daily social media task

If you write blog posts for your website, then use this content in bite size chunks across a number of social posts. Re-purposing your content is a great time saver. But if you don’t have a bank of content already, here’s some ways to start posting regularly and encouraging engagement with your audience: 

  • Create lists of favourite news feeds and share interesting articles for your audience. Once you have the list in place, each day dip into it and see if there is anything to share. 
  • Check notifications, have you been mentioned, or any posts highlighted? This is another quick way to see if there is anything interesting to share. It’s also a time to make sure whether there are any comments you need to respond to or add your own thoughts on the topic so you can be seen as a thought leader.  
  • Is it a national or international day of interest relevant to your business and your audience? Adding relevant hashtags will help extend reach. 
  • #PhotoOfTheDay – does what it says on the tin really! Take a photo of one of your products and share.
  • Talk about a company milestone. 
  • Give insight into how and why you started your business.
  • Do you have any new products or services to talk about?
  • Remind people about your core offering.  
  • Run a special offer.   

Social media marketing agency, Croydon

We’re a social media marketing agency and can help you formulate a social media campaign as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.  

365 Days of Social Media For Businesses

365 days of social media cheat sheet

It’s easy for businesses to neglect their social media, as posting every day can be difficult and time-consuming when you’re unsure as to what you should post.

We understand the pressures on business owners to continually create ongoing engaging content on a regular basis through social media.

That’s why we created our 365 days of social media posts cheat sheet, so that you never run out of ideas again!

In this guide, we provide you with ideas on the types of posts you can share each day of the year, from national days through to polls and talking about your personal business journey.

These tips will not only help you engage with your existing audience, they’ll also assist you in increasing your visibility on your social channels and attracting new business.

Keep your social posts up to date with the latest events and trends with our cheat sheet of 365 days of ideas for social media posts.

TikTok

Why do people use TikTok?

TikTok has released a new Global Authenticity Study providing insight into the app and what makes it unique from other social platforms.

The TikTok research with Nielsen is as a result of a survey with over 8,000 TikTok users. This makes it a truly comprehensive report and delve into the popular social network to “understand people’s perceptions of content and brand authenticity on TikTok compared to other top social and video platforms”.

TikTok prides itself in enabling individual users to be “their authentic selves” and this goes for brands too. In fact, this was confirmed in the survey findings with 64% of respondents saying they can be their true selves on the platform.

TikTok goes onto explain: “Nielsen’s study shows users around the globe find TikTok content to be authentic, genuine, unfiltered and trendsetting. At the same time, when looking specifically at advertising content, users still associated terms such as authentic and genuine, while adding honest, real, unique and fun.”

In terms of TikTok for business, what does this mean?

The report revealed significant findings globally, with an average of 79% of users finding TikTok content to be unique or different; and 68% of TikTok users found advertising content specifically to be unique or different from any competitive platform.

In addition, an average of 60% of channel users said they follow brands. And, an average of 70% say TikTok is a platform they would recommend to others.

This means that a large number of platform users could be receptive to your brand content about product or services.

So, should you use TikTok for your business?

There’s no doubt that these are incredible statistics and consumer brands should certainly review the findings as part of research when considering social channels for business.

However, if you are using social media as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, remember it’s not about jumping on the bandwagon and following the herd. It’s about considering social platforms in relation to your business and your target audience.

You will find that some social channels are more relevant than others so it’s always good to do a bit of investigating first.

Statistics like these offer great insight and can form part of your research into what social media channel is best for you.

Understand the demographics of a social platform and check out your competitors and see what they are talking about and which social channels are popular amongst them. It’s likely that if the majority in your sector are on specific channels more than others for example LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram then there may well be a reason for that.  

Talk to us about your digital marketing needs and how social media marketing can fit within your overall strategy.