Social Media, Not quite taught in school.

Part of my work was to manage the Organisation's social media. It was grossly outdated and almost never touched. I felt like my first job was to get it hyped up again and regain the traction that it used to have; or. well. not sure if it did have any traction before - but I'm sure that 500 likes did count for something?

I then found myself slightly lost, as to how to go about doing this. After all, how Facebook, twitter, youtube worked was never a module in classes. So began a long research process and to my surprise, I learnt quite a bit. Here are some lessons that I learnt, hopefully they might help you out:

1. Schedule your posts. ALWAYS DO THAT. I never even thought I could schedule it, but if you're planning on posting content manually, you're in for a hard time. 
2. Use pictures! They are much more engaging and gain a lot more traction.
3. Really really really long posts tend to have more engagement if you managed to get people to read them, after all readers feel that if they have invested that amount of time to read the post, that they should give a comment or something. Of course it had better be a meaningful post.
4. Posting at lunch time is a clutter. almost everyone does that, however, you get the post amount of attention because that's when people check their phones. 
5. The algorithm of Facebook has changed. getting likes isn't enough. You need them to click "Get Notifications"
6. You can link your Facebook with your twitter account so that it tweets everything you post.
7. There's a program called sendible that can allow you to mass upload post schedules. It is extremely useful and saves a lot of time. I wish I found out about it earlier. 
8. An alternative to sendible is hootsuite, but sendible allows you to upload photos, hootsuite doesn't.
9. Tag people in photos so that it appears on their wall. That's a lot more permanent than on the scrolling news wall. 
10. Photos that you use on Google can be copyrighted. Anything on Facebook however, you can feel free to share.
11. To prevent yourself from using copyrighted images, you can click on the advance settings to filter by usage rights. That way you know for sure that you won't get sued.
12. If you want to use nice images, there's a site called http://www.dollarphotoclub.com/. If you sign on as a member, you get really nice photos for a dollar each. I don't use it, but I stumbled across it while looking for photos. 
13. Youtube has an inbuilt video editor that can do simple edits online. 
14. Write a description for your videos! If not Google won't be able to find it! And if Google doesn't, then no on will!...
15. When frustrated, sing a song!

I hope these little lessons I've learnt will help you in your social media management!

Signing off, 

Eugene Wong