Now a days social media is equally as important as the image you like to portray in person as well as your website, and I would even go as far to say that it is equivalent to telephone communication for many organisations. Many larger corporations respond quicker to tweets and Facebook messages than it takes the customer to get through to the correct person on the telephone. In addition, social sites are your opportunity to understand your customers and clients. They also enable you to talk to your current, new and potential client base instantly! You don’t have to wait until the paper press has printed the article or people have clicked to open their newsletter on their desktop.

So why oh why do we see brands repeatedly fail at their social media branding? Why are fuzzy Facebook pictures, badly cropped logos and busy twitter backgrounds continuing to plague the web by brands big enough to know better? Do they not realise that a badly branded social media page gives out the message in a widely used public sphere that not enough time, attention, or care is afforded to the most important part of any company: the public image of the brand.

Hence we here at CuCo thought we would share our findings on what we have found can improve your social media platform for the next several weeks focusing on each platform on their own but we are starting on an overall overview relevant to them all:

A) LOGO/IMAGE

It is never a good idea to squash logos/images or crop them badly to squeeze them into a profile image space – this shows your company hasn’t had the time, money or inclination to invest in the social media sphere, which is a bad message to put out to consumers who use social networking sites regularly. If you can’t be bothered to invest care and time into your brand or social media space, why should they?

B) WORD COUNT

Ensure you keep to the suggested word limit for each platform. Most of us (me included) have the tendency to want to over write or over explain, however with social media this can lose followers.

C) COPYING

We advise not to simply copy and paste from one site to another as each site has it’s own customer group. We aren’t saying create or find three or four separate resources every day. We are simply suggesting that you take your time to adjust the posts to reach your correct audience.

D) TIMINGS

There is quite a debate as to when is the best time to post on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google+ etc. Many sites will advice that between 1-4 is a popular time in the week, excluding Fridays as people lose interest after 3pm. There is also many suggestions that Sundays are good yet some organisations would dispute this as they will have an employee analysing this for them throughout the week and they would be able to pin point when exactly their audience is the most responsive. Hence we do recommend that you learn your customer behaviour and figure out the best trends for you.

Next week we will specifically focus on Facebook and share what we have learnt throughout the years.