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When posting content on social media platforms, what best practices should you follow?
A story is temporary content on your social experience, so it's important to understand its ephemeral short-lived nature. Let's walk through some of the best practices for creating an optimal story.
Stories are a great way of showing an authentic, raw side to your brand. You can do this through sharing photos, interviews, and exclusive behind-the-scenes content. You can also use social influencers with your stories to assist with reach and credibility. Have them create story takeovers. This means they come onto your account and take over your story feed for a whole day. You can use them to grab users' attention and share messaging points.
Be sure to fully leverage any native platform tools that are available. For example, make use of all the editing features and customization tools that are native to stories.
You can diversify your story's content by adding videos, photos, and Boomerangs to keep it interesting. You can use “@mentions” to mention other users within your story. So when you're having a social influencer take over, or if you want to highlight a partner or business, you can tag them in your story.
Consider including a "See More" link to drive traffic from your story to an alternate location. That could be your business's website, somewhere that generates leads, or a promotion. Be sure to have a clear narrative about whatever event you're promoting in your story.
Lastly, be sure to include a clear CTA, like a promo code or a link to your website, that will drive a trackable action from your consumers.
When posting video content on social media platforms, what best practices should you follow?
Firstly, you can optimize performance by grabbing attention in the first three seconds. User attention is limited, so it's important to insert your key message in the first few seconds to drive recall and impact, which can be developed later in the videos.
On mobile devices and in office environments, the majority of users have their sound off. In order to communicate your verbal message from your video, it's important to create for sound off. You can do this by using closed caption subtitles and onscreen text.
An incredibly high number of users view social content on mobile devices and scroll vertically on their mobiles. Therefore, it’s essential that marketers align their videos to how the vast majority of users prefer to view them. Essentially, this means shooting for vertical views on mobile. Doing this will have the greatest impact on consumer engagement. It may mean that landscape or widescreen TV commercials need to be re-edited for portrait social video views on mobiles.
To continue the engagement after the video has completed, marketers can build in a “play more” function, so users can view other related content after they finish watching your video. Think of it like brining the audience on a journey through your content catalogue.
Finally, use “Live” to capture live events and add a greater degree of urgency for followers to engage with. Share the live video to your story for 24 hours before it disappears – or discard it immediately. The number of viewers for your live video includes everyone who watched the live video and the replay.
Hashtags are a very useful tool for marketers to use. A hashtag is a word or a phrase preceded by the number sign or hash sign, and it is used to categorize keywords or topics, allowing users to easily find or follow a specific conversation of interest to them. By clicking on a hashtag, you're able to display related conversations, and easily discover, organize, and track topics of interest.
Hashtags are great for marketers because they increase brand recognition, expand reach, and target new consumers. They also allow you to create, join, or impact conversations that are relevant to your brand or business.
If you’d like to use more than three hashtags, “hidden hashtags” is a useful technique to make your posts look cleaner and less spammy. You can hide hashtags by manipulating the number of characters in your post caption or by inserting line breaks in your caption.
Hashtags come with their own set of best practices.
Please note that the module slides are designed to work in collaboration with the module transcript document. It is recommended that you use both resources simultaneously.
Kristin Shine is Founder and General Manager of Shine Healthcare and Science Consulting. She advises clients in the healthcare space on digital strategy development, business development, strategic communications, and commercial partnerships.
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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This module introduces the key social media platforms for digital marketing and demonstrates how to set up a social media experience for a business. It explains the techniques and best practices for growing and engaging a social media audience and demonstrates how to create effective paid advertising campaigns on the key social platforms. It also covers how to extract and report on data from the platforms’ native analytics tools to derive deeper audience and campaign insights.