Social Media; Not as Simple as it Seems

Hi everyone,

Today I wanted to share with everyone the experience I’ve had with social media while interning at Magnetize. Obviously we all know social media is one of the key elements of our eventual role as public relations practitioners. A strong social media presence is a key aspect in any part of modern marketing and PR efforts. At Magnetize it is of high importance to include social media as part of all communication strategies and to ensure the success of these efforts they must display engaging content.

One of the main challenges during my time at Magnetize is creating such a variety of social media posts for various clients. We deal with anyone from IT companies, hair dressing studios, finance brokers, cosmetic therapies and local community based groups. This really keeps me on my toes, as I have to switch quickly from one client to another. Some of the key strategies I’ve used during my time here is to really think about who our target audience is for these posts, are they looking for simple posts or do they want lots of information so they don’t have to go to a second source? Or are they purely there for the most visual appealing posts?

 I learnt very quickly that posts that needed more of a visual appeal included any clients that worked in a creative type role, the posts that created the most likes for these users were bright, short worded and kept a constant theme.  In comparison for more traditional businesses such as the finance brokers and IT companies, their users preferred to see quick and factual posts with visuals being less important to these people. Finally I noted that our community based clients liked the most information in a single post, this included ones on Facebook and Instagram, written content was of very high importance to these clients and visuals while also important definitely were not priority number one.

Once determining these factors and creating the social media posts as drafts I used Hootsuite to schedule the posts across generally periods of two weeks at a time. This was also a really great tool that during my studies I had heard about but had never used before. It basically allows a person/organisation or consultancy that has one social media account or more to schedule posts on various platforms to allow for consistent uploading. At Magnetize we have a premium Hootsuite account that allows us to have multiple clients accounts in one convenient location. Another great feature about Hootsuite is that by preselecting when to upload you can target certain groups during peak social media times. Depending on the client I was posting for the times that were generally the most successful were between 8am-9am and 5-7pm. These times are generally when people are commuting to work or arriving home and tend to view social media sites the most.

Learning how to effectively use social media postings has been one of the greatest experiences I’ve had during my time at Magnetize. I’ve learnt the value of content, time and audience. These were things I hadn’t necessarily thought too much during my own personal use of social media, but it was great to be able to use and develop skills I already had and put them to use in a practical sense. Thanks for reading, until next time.

Xoxo B