Your Manchester Social Media Marketing Agency

We’re Embryo, an award-winning, full-service digital marketing agency in Manchester. We are known for our disruptive social media marketing strategies and modern cross-channel advertising campaigns. Our consistent ‘above and beyond’ attitude to service across the marketing sphere (for example, through SEO, PPC, and content marketing has helped us become renowned for our marketing prowess.

Our client strategies include Facebook lead generation adverts, Instagram TV promotion, social-first live streaming, disruptive organic content distribution, LinkedIn brand awareness, Twitter competitions, Snapchat profile growth, YouTube channel promotion, and anything else you can think of under the social media marketing umbrella. You can feel confident that our experienced, results-driven social media team will find a way to get the job done.

 

Social media networks

Social Media Management and why your business needs social media marketing to stay relevant

In today’s world, you need to connect with your audience and make them feel valued – so that they can see the value in you. It’s all well and good having a Facebook page or LinkedIn account, but if there’s been no activity for 6 months and comments have gone unanswered, then your brand’s ‘useless’ personality creates itself. Social media helps you to understand and build trust with your audience, and through posting content that resonates with them, boosts your brand’s engagement, website traffic and leads.

How do you express yourself? What makes you different, and more importantly, what makes you better than all the other companies in your industry? With so many platforms to present yourself on and so many creative ways to do it, let’s show the world the real you, the wonderful you. And if you’re not quite sure who that is yet, then we can develop that together, too.

In the digital age, it has never been more difficult to stand-out, despite the fact that there are more tools at our disposal than ever. Not only is it a challenge to stand out online, but cutting through the noise to gain, and just as importantly keep, the attention of your target audience has left many managing directors unsure of what to do. However, if your social media marketing is done the right way, you can consider this hurdle jumped. That is what social media is: a game of attention (doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as a Game of Thrones, does it?). All of your competitors will be using the same marketing channel and trying to reach the same audience as you, so how are you going to step ahead of them and get that audience to look and listen? That’s where we come in.

Social media strategy

Organic content is king

We believe that a big part of what sets us apart from other social media marketing agencies is how we create our organic content strategies.

At all times, our social media department strives to not be an agency that just ‘does social’. Being an agency that ‘does social’ is just ticking the box. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can create a spreadsheet with one Facebook post a week in. To do more than that and make an impact on your target market is the big challenge. Saturation of the market has created the mass of online noise that we as social media marketers contend with every day, meaning we have to be innovative and agile to keep our organic strategies effective.

We do this by using our own unique method that we have coined ‘Derek’. Great name, right? If you’re interested in what it is, just ask us.

Viral Content

As a marketer, virality is the bulls-eye on the dartboard of performance metrics and KPIs. To most, virality is this nebulous thing that might happen to your latest post while you’re sleeping. If you think this – you’re pretty much spot on. However, viral content is a powerful tool for a business and something that we imagine no business owner would refuse. Viral content and how it works may seem mysterious, but we know that there’s a method behind the madness, and our Derek strategy takes this into consideration.

Social media planning

Our unbeatable social media strategies

At Embryo, we create social media strategies that integrate your brand’s identity and audience with market insight and trending topics. No matter what the goal is or the target we’re aiming for, your posts will spark conversation, community growth and everlasting loyalty.

We are not just your social media managers, we are your social media consultants. This means that we’re involved in everything from account set up and maintenance to building and bolstering your brand identity with campaigns that will create ambassadors out of your audience. We don’t just excessively post and hope one lands – each post is uniquely crafted by listening to and understanding your audience. We use innovative methods and processes to create content that shows your users you understand what they want, and that your company will stop at nothing to give it to them. We’ll create monthly social media schedules that announce company events, market insights and promotions to your audience, intertwining your unique tone of voice (T.O.V.) and brand imagery that we can help you define and create.

Every single post is written with the relevant social media channel in mind, integrating appropriate hashtags, emojis and stories. We’ll regularly engage with your audience to ensure campaign effectiveness and find out what makes them tick. Should you want an influencer of the celebrity or blogger variety, we’ll make sure they’re always shouting and raving about how brilliant you are, so that their audiences follow suit.

From mundane but crucial tasks to the fun and challenging hurdles, our strategies ensure that no box is left unticked and your brand cements itself with a solid digital presence on the correct social media platforms, in an appropriate way.

Social media perfromance

Performance tracking and account management

Part of being a metronomic digital agency is constantly having your finger on the pulse of the latest social media analytics. Tracking trends via performance tools and social listening tools so that nothing in any industry goes unseen is a must.

Understanding how your social media content performs can have a big impact on the way you run your business. Understanding your analytics can help increase engagement by being able to see what kind of content performs well, making you aware of what to post more of. Analytics can also tell you more about your audience, highlight strengths and weaknesses in your digital strategy and even quantify how positive or negative the public feel about your company. As machine learning and AI software develop further, what analytics can tell you about how your business is performing online will only get better.

The bottom line of social media is that it is an attention game. Your goal should be to grab the attention of your market, and keep it, while you get them to carry out actions along the way. To do this, you need to increase your followers and engagement numbers through a high-quality strategy.

Above all, your social media should add value to your market and create positive emotions inside the heads and hearts of your audience. Whether it’s a useful step-by-step guide, a promotional offer or a lighthearted Saturday morning post of your dog, always aim to provide good content that gives your audience something they want.

Through tracking your analytics, we can clearly see if your audience is happy with what you are doing on social media or whether they are uninterested, and what we can do to make your strategy better.

Social media audience

Finding your audience and building a message for them

Social media marketing campaigns have the big advantage of appealing to a wide-ranging audience at the same time. A social media campaign can appeal to the general public, your stakeholders, employees, prospective customers and more, all at once. Using social media websites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, marketers are able to use a broad range of tactics and strategies to promote content and actually get people to engage with it. Because social networks collect a lot of data about their users, such as geographical, demographic and personal information, we can use this data to segment audiences. This means we can better tailor messages to something that will better resonate with different users.

Internet audiences can be more easily segmented than traditional marketing audiences, meaning that we can ensure that our clients are putting their money and focus on the exact audience they want to target. We live in an era where 46% of social media users say that they’ll unfollow a company or brand that is overly promotional, while 41% of users say they’ll unfollow a brand that shared too much irrelevant content. This means that to create authentic and enduring brand awareness, you can’t publish solely promotional content. You also can’t post too much irrelevant fluff either, but you still want to be posting a lot. It’s a tricky balancing act that our social team have managed to perfect.

Social media followers

Build a loyal following

1,000 loyal brand advocates are worth a lot more than 10,000 indifferent customers. Loyal patrons of your brand are more likely to return to your business, interact with you online, provide testimony, and spread that ever so valuable word of mouth. Real engagement and advocacy gives you an invaluable boost to your online presence and performance, and good social media management can find you that audience.

The right social media campaign can turn fans into messengers, spreading the word of your brand with shares and retweets. To achieve this, remember that your followers want to interact with real people, not bots or corporate machines. You need to be human. People don’t want to be sold to all the time, and social media is the perfect platform to build a relationship with your customers.

Capture your audience’s attention

Social media usage has almost tripled since 2010. Currently, 2.77 billion people use social media, up from 0.97 at the start of the decade. And we’re predicted to hit over 3 billion in 2021.

What does that mean for the way you market using social media? Well, more users means more business and more competition across all different platforms. You’re going to have to find a way to stand out from the crowd.

We’ve seen social media marketing become more competitive, and we’ve adapted alongside it. Now, we have a lot of tricks in our toolbox that help clients stand out and grab their audience’s attention. It’s all about making your content stick to the readers like honey.

Using user-generated content is a fantastic way of adding a touch of authenticity to your social media presence. Not only does this foster that coveted word of mouth marketing everyone is desperate for, but it also stops readers in their tracks. The moment they see a brand engaging, interacting and listening to their audience, they see you as a brand that will build a relationship and respect them.

Custom-made images and graphics immediately stand out on social media. There’s so much stock imagery used that people see something unique as worth paying attention to. Taking time to do this is a small but effective way of drawing attention towards your brand on social media.

We have a number of other social media tricks up our sleeves. If you’re interested in how Embryo can help your social media stand out and engage your audience, get in touch with us today.

(p.s. use infographics. People really love infographics.)

Digital marketing report

Lastly, we report

We analyse all your KPIs (key performance indicators) to ensure that our social media marketing strategies are getting you the results that you and your business need to succeed.

Every month you’ll receive a report detailing how well your adverts and posts have performed, based on expertly chosen demographics, audience interests and ad placements. Likes, comments, shares, reach and impressions are our engagement markers, with conversion being the ultimate aim. Continuous assessment and research will mould our ongoing strategy, ensuring your audience can’t help but want to visit your website and find out more.

Paid Social Media

How can we target your audience?

  • Their location.

  • Their demographics.

  • Their interests.

  • Their online behaviours.

  • Email data.

  • Custom and lookalike audiences.

  • Customer lists.

  • And more…

What campaigns can we run?

  • Brand awareness.

  • Lead generation.

  • Website purchases

  • Reach and impressions.

  • Direct message inbox acquisitions.

  • Website traffic.

  • Post engagements.

  • Video views.

  • Page likes.

  • Event promotion.

  • And more…

Lead & Learn

Why you need paid social ads in your social media strategy

We’ve talked about the fact that social media is a noisy world, which is where social media ads come into play. The moment you start running advertising campaigns on social media, you slice through all the garbage and get in front of your target audience – whether they are potential clients, customers, or an avid reader of your content. Using social media ads, you can appear right at the end of their index finger as they’re looking at their mobile phone.

The first stage in any sale is awareness, so naturally, you want to be advertising in the places your target audiences are looking. It is only in the last decade or so that we have had the power to advertise on a medium which is always in someone’s hand or pocket, but many businesses still aren’t capitalising on this.

At Embryo, our social media team have experience promoting a wide variety of different companies and sectors in fun and exciting ways. This is down to the extensive advertising campaign and audience targeting options at our disposal, and the talent of our team.

 

Picking your paid social media platform

The main three platforms to run social media adverts on are Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Our expert social media team are experienced in all three and work with all our clients to pick the right platform for them. It all comes down to target audience and business objective. Sometimes all three are recommended for a complex cross-platform social media marketing campaign. LinkedIn is a more professional platform, so if you’re looking to target lawyers, accountants, directors, etc. it may be that this social media channel works best. If you’re looking to target millennials with a very visual product, Instagram might be the best for you. We take into consideration every factor to ensure that we choose the best social media platform for your business to succeed.

Get creative with your ad designs

Social media ads need to be three things; informative, intriguing and eye-catching. If your advert falls down in any of these three categories, your campaigns won’t perform well. The most targeted campaigns in the world will fail if they don’t stand out creatively. When you launch social media, they are judged by the platform on equal parts targeting and creative. With this in mind, our social media team ensures that every advert is as engaging as possible.

There are certain creative types that work best in social media ads. For example, Facebook prefers videos that are vertical and less than 15 seconds long with subtitles (if needed), as opposed to landscape, interview-style videos that rely on sound. LinkedIn adverts with videos work well, but again need to be subtitled if they require sound to get the full experience. Instagram stories require specifically sized videos to fit correctly, and anything less than 9:16 will undoubtedly underperform. If your business doesn’t particularly lend itself to video, carousels or engaging graphics work second best. But there are always new features becoming available and increasing in popularity, such as the LinkedIn PDF carousel. Don’t worry if you don’t have this kind of content readily available, our social and design team can work closely with you to create the perfect designs.

With paid social ads, it is all about being short and snappy, using as little text as possible. This concise but effective approach is what helps us deliver the best possible results to our clients.

Target your campaigns

Once our social media team has worked with you to create your target audience and decide on the platforms, it is then down to their social media expertise to specifically target all campaigns. The outstanding targeting capabilities of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn allow us to really narrow down on the target audience. The more data the better, and that is essential with social media advertising campaigns. Optimised social media adverts can really make use of any and every bit of data that you have and turn this into effective marketing campaigns.

The key with Facebook adverts or Instagram adverts specifically, is the Facebook Pixel. For every client we ensure that this piece of tracking is implemented on your website, so that we can correctly track every movement on your website and send all this data through to Facebook. The more data that this code sends to Facebook, the more effective your ad campaigns will be. The Facebook Pixel allows us to create retargeting campaigns, lookalike campaigns, custom audiences and more. LinkedIn also has a similar feature called Insight Tag, that allows us to capture website data to optimise campaigns. The Facebook Pixel and Insight Tag are essential to all paid social advertising.

There’s not just Pixel data that we can use to target campaigns. With social media advertising you can target based on simple demographics such as age, gender, location, and then break this down further into interests, job titles, online behaviours and more. If you’re looking to target 30 year old women who are interested in yoga, who are vegetarian and live within a 20 mile radius of Manchester, we can do that! The extensive features allow our social media team to get your ads shown in front of the correct people.

Clear, data-driven reporting

Whilst we are maintaining continuous communication with our clients, at the end of every month we will send a full breakdown of the month’s paid social results. This will pull in from a variety of sources, including Google Analytics, on platform analytics – e.g. Facebook analytics, and website analytics. We then interpret this data, giving you the key facts about your campaigns. With our return focused approach, ROI is at the forefront of every social media report, allowing you to see the efficacy of your campaigns in terms of your business goals. Our in depth reporting method is key to developing our ongoing strategies and optimising paid social media campaigns.

 

It’s all about brand awareness

Paid social media is an incredible tool for a variety of business objectives, but the biggest and most important, that needs to be included in every social media strategy, is brand awareness. If you are looking to generate leads through social media, boost your following or use paid social advertising to increase sales, the first step is always building up your brand presence. To reach new audiences and get them to convert immediately is always a tough job, but with initial brand awareness campaigns, this changes significantly. The key with social media advertising is to drive website traffic or video views or engagement primarily, and then use this data to start a social media marketing funnel. Including this brand focused step will allow you to decrease your cost per conversion and increase your return.

The amazing thing about social media advertising is that it allows you to reach potential new customers at the click of a button. With the amazing targeting options and versatility to adapt to every business, you can get your brand messaging in front of new customers and achieve incredible results. Our social media team are experts at working with our clients to ensure that each and every campaign is tailored perfectly to the target audience and achieving the best results.

Stay focused on results

We don’t just launch campaigns and hope for the best. We monitor, double check, amend, optimise and do it all over again. Social media ad performance can change drastically on a daily basis, so it is vital that our social team are up to date with the campaigns at all times.

Every campaign that we launch is ROI (return on investment) driven. What does this mean for our clients? It means that our clients get the best results possible for their money. When it comes to e-commerce clients in particular, our primary objective is to increase ROAS (return on ad spend) and keep cost per conversion low. With lead focused clients, we are continually reviewing lead quality to ensure the highest possible conversion rate. We don’t launch campaigns without return in mind. It’s this mindset that makes our social media team and paid social media results as effective as possible.

We’re nimble creatives

The introduction of social networks into our day-to-day lives has revolutionised the way we communicate with friends and brands and the way that we consume information. In the world of social media, if you’re not creative, up to date and ever-changing, you won’t progress. This is down to the speed and ruthlessness of which social media has swooped into our lives and is comfortably dominating it.

Marketers can no longer hide from what used to be the new-kid-on-the-block; social media is without a doubt becoming the largest advertising channel in our disposal, so if you’re not making the most of it, you are making a mistake. On a weekly basis, the social networks are tweaking their algorithms and releasing new features for users and brands. For example, in 2016, Instagram began releasing their new feature – Instagram Stories. Now, in 2019, there is reported to be over 500 million daily users of the feature. Could this have been predicted at its release? Surely not.

The social networks are overflowing with innovation and disruptive changes on a weekly (if not daily) basis, and the way that users are being forced to consume content on these channels is constantly changing. To keep pace with these networks, you need to be nimble and creative. Which is exactly what Embryo’s social media team is.

For a brand to compete on social media, they need to be nimble. For a brand to win on social media, they need to be creative. If you’re doing both, you’ve got nothing to worry about!

We believe that creativity is bred from landscapes of restriction and limitation. And, what marketing channel is more restricted than a social network app? There are millions of businesses competing for the attention of the same people, at the same time, at the same place. The only way to cut through this is through being creative. Just look at some of the best brands on social media, they have got there through disrupting the landscape with a never-before-seen creative approaches. Take Wendy’s for example, they genuinely understand what people are talking about as it relates to their brand and why. From sassy responses on Facebook to trolling other fast food chains on Twitter, Wendy’s understands the importance of taking a chance.

For your business to be a winner in this new age of digital marketing, you need to be a fantastic creative, or use someone who is.

Social Media Questions Answered:

How should a business choose which social media channels to focus on? Each social media channel can help your business achieve very different goals, however this is entirely dependent on your business goals.. If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, Instagram is a great tool, but that wouldn’t work for you if you sell cardboard boxes, as it is a very visual platform. To work out the route for you, it’s best to think about your business goals – what do you actually want to achieve from using social media? From there, you can establish the best channels for you. If you are a business that designs bespoke candles for homes, then Pinterest and Instagram should be your focus, due to the importance of visual content on the platform. If you own a tech company, then your time should be spent mostly on Twitter and LinkedIn, as your target market will mainly be business owners and that is where their attention lies. If you own a fitness clothing company, then you would be silly not to spend your time growing your brand on Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, a good social media agency will inform you on the best channels for your business and not encourage social channels that don’t suit your needs.

I boost my Facebook posts, is that paid social media? Boosted posts are a form of paid social media, as you pay Facebook to serve your post to more people. It is effectively a mini advert, as you don’t need an ads manager or business manager, or any of the more complicated advertising tools. But, just clicking ‘boost’ on your posts does not make it an effective form of paid social media. It is important that you have a full strategy in place and make sure that you are working towards achieving your business goals.

Why do you need a social media agency, I can just do social media myself? Social media can be an extremely beneficial tool for any business, but only when it is done correctly. Anyone can set up an ad, boost a post or post an image, that is true. However, an in depth strategy with targeting funnels, custom audiences and event tracking is needed to really achieve results. By using a social media agency, you are utilising the experience and knowledge of a team who work across multiple industries, testing audiences and using all different advertising types, with expert knowledge of what works best and therefore, what can work best for you.

You could probably bake a birthday cake if you wanted to, but you can’t guarantee it will come out how you would like because you’re not really a baker. If you want a guaranteed good birthday cake, you’d buy one or get someone to make one for you. Social media is the same.

What is Facebook ads manager? Facebook ads manager is the platform that you use to design and launch all your adverts, create all your targeting, set up all your tracking and see the results. Without an ads manager you are extremely limited in your advertising capabilities. Social media agencies will always recommend you have an ads manager set up, if not they will set one up for you.

How do I get an Instagram story advert for my business? Instagram is part of the Facebook family, so Instagram, whether in feed or story, are all run through the Facebook ads manager. When building your ad you tick the placements that you want your ad to run on. In this list is every placement that Facebook offers, there are around 19 options to choose from. In that list you will find Instagram stories. I always recommend selecting ‘automatic placements’, that way Facebook selects which placements work best for you advert. However, if you have designed a video or image specifically for Instagram stories, you can deselect all other placements from the list and just keep stories checked.

What is the Facebook Audience Network? Facebook’s Audience Network is an ad placement available to you through the ads manager. Facebook effectively has a network of apps that it allows you to run your adverts on. Ever accidentally clicked an ad that popped up halfway through playing Candy Crush? There’s a good chance it’s actually a Facebook ad that’s being run through the audience network. I always recommend using automatic placements when running adverts, as you never know if Audience Network could get you results.

What is retargeting on social media? Retargeting is when you target someone with a Facebook/LinkedIn/Instagram/Twitter ad, after you have already targeted them with an ad. This is part of the targeting funnel. Social channels allows you to build an audience of people that have already engaged with your advert, so that you can then target those people again (retarget) with another, different advert. This allows you to create multiple funnel stages e.g. awareness, consideration, conversion, and get really granular with your targeting. You can retarget people based on multiple different actions – website visits, video views, likes and comments, contact form submissions, etc. Retargeting should be an essential part of every social media campaign.

What is the Facebook Pixel? The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you put on your website that tracks all activity off the back of your advert. Every time someone clicks on your ad and goes through to your website, the Pixel follows them around your website and tracks every click and page view they make (as long as you set up your event tracking). Without the Pixel, you can track how many people click your ads, but aside from that you are very limited. With the Pixel installed, you can build audiences of people who have added your item to basket, checked out, abandoned basket, filled in a contact form, clicked to call, clicked to email, signed up to the newsletter etc. The list is (nearly) endless. From here, you can target those people specifically, or target people similar to those people with a lookalike audience. If you do not have a Pixel installed, your paid social strategy will fail. It is that simple.

Is social media dying? Social media has its negative sides, no one is disputing that, so it is no surprise that there has been a surge in people taking a break from social media. However, social media is always constantly growing and evolving. Will social media ever die? Absolutely not. Social media will probably change significantly, maybe even to the point where it’s unrecognisable as what it is today, but it will never die out completely. That’s actually a good thing. Think of all the opportunities there are for your brand online in the future.

How much budget do I need to allocate for ad spend on social media? Budget is entirely dependent on your business, your business goals, and how much a conversion is worth to you (whether that be a website visit, purchase, contact etc.). If you have a big call to action, such as a lead for a £50,000 deal, you’re going to want to have quite a lot of budget. But, if you’re looking to sell a £20 hairbrush, you can spend a bit less.

Social media advertising is without a doubt a pay-to-play space. Huge corporate companies with bottomless budgets are always going to plough money into the channels and get amazing results. But, if you’re just starting out, it isn’t necessary (or advisable) to go in with an unlimited pot of money and hope for the best. Social budgets require a lot of consideration. If you’ve never run adverts before, it is best to start with around £1,000 for a month. Test this budget, see how quickly this is eaten up or whether you are achieving the kind of numbers you’d like. Then from there add more. Gradually build up your campaign. Ideally, you do want to be spending quite a lot, but if you’re a small business you can start small.

How targeted can your social ads be? As targeted as you’d like! Each platform has different capabilities. Facebook allows you to get really granular on an interest level – you can target people who have friends with a birthday in 0-7 days, or people that live away from home, or people that have an anniversary coming up. LinkedIn lets you get really granular on a professional level, targeting exact job titles, years of experience, job seniority etc. it’s important to look at each platform’s capabilities and primary audiences first, before just deciding you’re going to advertise.

What is Instagram Shopping? Instagram Shopping is a relatively new feature that allows your audience to shop your products straight from your Instagram feed. You can tag products in your images or stories, and when tapped, they will reveal the price and take the user straight through to the product page for that item. This is a really effective tool for ecommerce businesses, and should be utilised where possible.

Are LinkedIn ads worth it? If your audience is professionals under 50, LinkedIn is basically a gold mine for you. With the extensive targeting options available to you, you can target your exact audience very easily. Ads on LinkedIn are, on average, slightly pricier than Facebook in terms of CPC and CPL, however the audience quality is ten times better. LinkedIn adverts are definitely worth it, as long as it fits with your business audience.

Can I advertise on different social channels at the same time? The simple answer: yes! A multichannel approach to social media advertising can be very effective. If your audience are on millennial online shoppers, you’re going to achieve results from Facebook and Instagram, but you wouldn’t expect to get sales from LinkedIn. So just be wary of where your audience spends their time online. Not only can you run ads across different social channels, but you can also run adverts on social media and PPC if you’re looking for a wider online presence.

What is the LinkedIn Insight tag? The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a piece of code that you put on your website to track what your audience does on your website once they’ve clicked through from one of your adverts. It is very similar to the Facebook Pixel. The Insight Tag allows you to set up conversions and track these, meaning you can create audiences of people that have visited your website or clicked a button. It is essential to any LinkedIn advertising.

How many people use social media? Social Media is used by a huge amount of people. It is ever growing and ever changing, constantly bringing in new audiences and new generations. The number is estimated to be around 3 billion worldwide, but the figure is always increasing!

How do you use social media for business? The answer to this question is never going to be a short, or in fact an easy one. Depending on what your business is, and what the goals of that business are, the answer will change. Every platform has different capabilities and different audiences, so it is important that you look into this thoroughly. There are two main types of social media marketing; organic social media and paid social media. Organic social media is when you post on your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. without paying for it. You simply type and click post. Paid social media is what it says on the tin. This includes paid adverts, sponsored posts, promoted posts and many more. If you’re going to begin using social media for your business, you will need a good grasp of both sides to have a thoroughly successful strategy.

Why is social media important for business? Social media use is extremely widespread. You really struggle to find someone in 2020 who isn’t using social media, and it is the same for businesses. Without a doubt, your competitors are on social media gaining your market’s attention. They are effectively stealing your customers without you knowing it, simply by you not participating. Social media is an incredible tool for brand awareness, and you are losing yours by not taking part. By using social media marketing to advertise your business, you are ensuring that you are actually competing with your competitors.

Is social media right for my business? Social media is right for every business. There are roughly 3 billion people on social media around the world, there is bound to be some of your target audience on there. Whether you sell cardboard boxes, repair and maintain industrial machinery, or own a vegan restaurant, there are endless opportunities for you on social media. Due to the different capabilities and audiences of each channel, you are able to reach your audience and gain brand awareness. Every single business should be using social media.

How often should I post on social media? Your social posting frequency is entirely dependent on your business, your audience and what platforms you are using. If your audience is professionals, posting during the standard working hours of 9-5 when people are likely to be at work, is not the best way to increase engagement. When considering posting schedules, the factor to focus on is quality over quantity. You might think that posting three times a week will give you the best engagement rates, but if you get to the point where you are posting out below par content because you have to post on a Wednesday, you’re doing it wrong. Focus on quality – if you wouldn’t engage with it, why would your audience?

How to measure social media ROI (return on investment)? This is a very open question and one which is completely dependent on your goals. Perhaps you are a legal firm which was established in the early 1900s, therefore you have a solid business foundation and reputation, but nobody is aware of you. I would imagine that your goal is to increase brand awareness. Therefore, the way to measure your ROI from your social media efforts would be to keep a close eye on metrics such as shares and likes, and ultimately see how many people are talking about your brand as a result of your social media. On the other hand, you could be a freelance graphic designer, so, how would you measure your ROI? You would measure your return on investment by measuring how many leads, enquiries and website traffic you get which is attributed to the work you have put in on your social media platforms. It is completely dependable on your end-goal, as social media can provide many different metrics and KPIs. However, if you have a goal, there will be a way to reach it through social media.

Is social media good for small businesses? Social media is perfect for any size of business. If anything, it is more important for a small business than it is for an already established large business. This is due to the fact that the competition and noise in every industry are more crowded and louder than ever, and social media allows you to axe through this and make your mark. If you use social media right and understand the importance of social media marketing, you can make sure that your business and brand stays relevant and your target market becomes aware of you.

Is organic social media worth it? Organic social media is when you post on a social media channel without paying for it. Originally, organic social media on Facebook was extremely important and carried as much weight as paid advertising. However, with the ever-changing algorithms of the Facebook family, organic is slowly fading into the distance, with dwindling reach and even lower engagement levels across the board. However, that doesn’t mean that you should be using organic. If you invest a lot of time into planning an organic social media strategy, you really can get results. That is just the issue, people don’t want to develop a strategy and wait for results, but with organic you have to be patient.

How often do Facebook and Instagram change their algorithm? The algorithms on all social media channels change all the time, but Facebook and Instagram change the most. Normally you do not get much information on how they have changed or why, but it is something that, as a social media marketer or a page admin, you must get used to pretty quickly. It’s worth just constantly keeping an eye out for updates and changes so that you know what’s going on.

How do I get more Instagram followers? This is a question that you get asked a lot when you work in social media. The truth is, you just need to engage with other accounts. Instagram just wants people to engage on their platform – that is the whole point of the app. The algorithm values meaningful engagement, so if you are engaging with other accounts, they are engaging with you, you are responding to comments, sharing stories etc. your content will be shown to more people and you will organically get more followers. Don’t try and buy followers, this is just frowned upon by Instagram and will result in you losing followers and ranking.

Should I use hashtags? Hashtags were originally introduced as a way to discover content similar to yours on a social media channel. If you used the #food, people who were interested in looking at pictures of food could find your post. The principle is still the same, but the usage has changed. Hashtags, on Instagram specifically, have become a tool for gaining likes from bots, loads of new followers and just generally being spammy. When people discovered that you got more likes by using hashtags, they were then taken to the extreme, with over 30 hashtags per post. Recent studies have shown that it is best to use no more than 7 hashtags per post, otherwise their effectiveness dips. So the simple answer – yes, within reason.

Should I use Facebook Live for my business? Facebook Live is growing very quickly. Video works really well on social media, but live video works even better. Facebook encourages ‘real’ interactions, and by streaming a live, unedited, non-polished video, that is exactly what you are doing. It’s important to bear in mind however, that you need to have an engaged audience for live video to work. If you go from not really posting anything to sharing a live video, your engagement levels will be low.

What works best on social media, video or images? As a general rule of thumb, whatever is most engaging will work better on social media. In 8 out of 10 cases, that will be video. However, this does not mean that you can slap whatever video you want on social media and assume it gets engagement. Your video needs to be optimised for social media, primarily mobile. Fast, short video with quick transitions and subtitles is the best way to go. Be smart with your video and it will improve your strategy.

What are you not allowed to advertise on Facebook? There are endless rules of what you can and cannot advertise on Facebook. Of all social media channels, they have the most complex advertising policies. There are very strict rules on body image, profanity, weight loss, grammatical errors, drugs, alcohol etc. But the main policy that businesses come up against is normally ‘before and afters’. Before and afters are completely prohibited by Facebook, so if you run a teeth whitening company, or an aesthetics clinic, you must bear this in mind. At the end of the day, Facebook is just trying to make the platform safe and enjoyable for its users.

Do social media influencers work? Influencers have grown massively in the past few years and influencer marketing has become one of the driving forces of social media marketing. Although influencers and their #ad posts can get you lots of sales and engagement, just bear in mind the cost. Influencers can charge upwards of £8,000 for one post, so make sure you consider this before just throwing money at someone with a lot of followers. Also, double check if their audience is the same as your target audience, otherwise you’re out for a loss. Knowing your audience is key to social media marketing, and the same applies for influencer marketing. You wouldn’t advertise a triple beef burger on a vegan influencer’s Instagram, for example.

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