Give your social media channels a spring cleaning

Spring is the perfect time to clean up and clean out. But spring cleaning isn’t limited to tackling a pesky junk drawer or organizing that closet you’ve been avoiding. Digital clutter can be just as distracting as the clutter inside your home. Social media channels are your organization’s front door – this is the first place your audiences get a sense of who you are. Authentic, intentional social media channels have never been more important than they are today.

Here are seven tips on how to spring clean your brand’s social platforms so they can make their best first impression:

1. Assess and reset your social media goals
2. Get organized with an editorial calendar
3. Say ‘yes’ to social media analytics
4. Keep your branding up to date
5. Don’t break your bandwidth
6. Experiment with unique content formats
7. Two-way conversation is key

📊 Assess and reset your social media goals

Your first priority should be to look at what goals you set when you launched your social media channels. Strong social media goals make a statement about what you want to achieve with your marketing activity and can range from growing your total follower count to growing awareness around a product line or service area.

Whether you still need to establish goals or are trying to get back on track, these four questions are key:

• Are our channels achieving what we set out for them to do?
• Are our goals still right-sized for our business?
• What type of content resonates most with our followers?
• Am I following the key people, competitors and news outlets relevant to my industry?

You may find you need an entire reset – and that’s okay! Assessing and re-framing your social media goals are an important step. They encourage brand-building, generate referrals and determine how your content is prioritized and how many people you will reach.

📅 Get organized with an editorial calendar

A centralized editorial calendar can be your best friend. When used correctly, editorial calendars help plan your content across multiple platforms weeks and months in advance, equipping you to easily pivot and change content if necessary. Bucket your posts into themes with color coordination to ensure a curated and varied feed.

📈 Say ‘yes’ to social media analytics

Your social media goals are what determine your metrics. And because great content creation – from drafting a post’s copy to photo selection and graphic design – is time consuming, you want to make sure you’re squeezing as much value out of your posts as possible. Realtime feedback like post impressions, reach and engagement help chart a course for future strategy. Rather than throwing your content against a digital wall in hopes that it will stick, this feedback provides clarity on what’s working and what’s not. From there, you can double down on continuing with content that’s most successful and dump the low performing posts.

Every social media platform has its own native analytics tool. Here’s where to find them:

• Facebook: Insights tab
• LinkedIn: Analytics tab
• Twitter: Twitter Analytics
• Snapchat: Insights tab under your Bitmoji
• Instagram: Business accounts required to see data
• Pinterest: Business accounts required to see data

Whether you choose to track your analytics in an Excel document, Google Sheet or within a dedicated platform like Sprout Social or HubSpot is up to you and may depend on your budget.

Four key metrics to track are:

• Impressions: How many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline.
• Reach: The number of users who see your content, even if they see your content multiple times.
• Engagement: The number of likes, comments and shares on your content.
• Engagement rate: The number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. The higher the engagement rate, the more likely it is that audiences find the post interesting or relevant.

✨ Keep your branding up to date

Showcasing your brand on social media plays a significant role in landing new followers while retaining your existing audiences.

Three areas to review:

• Profile and cover photos: If either or both are older than two years, it’s time for an update. Platforms, including Facebook, leave a timestamp on the profile and cover photos, leaving your brand at risk of looking out of date. Use high-resolution images sized correctly, by channel.
• Bio: This is often the first place a user reads about you and is a great opportunity to inject your personality and key information. If you’ve refreshed your messaging lately, apply those changes to your social profile, too. Most social media channels include a dedicated website URL, so avoid putting it in your bio. Doing so will only eat into your precious character count, which is limited on several channels.
• Company information: Often overlooked, but important – especially if you’ve expanded your service offerings or added a new location. Double-check your website URL, business hours, contact information (including email) and services provided.

🤯 Don’t break your bandwidth

Newer and fast-growing channels like TikTok are intriguing additions to your social media strategy but do your research first: They can require longer lead times to produce high-quality, on-brand videos. Avoid jumping into a channel just because you want to. Leveraging your existing follower base, plus an algorithm that continues to prioritize exploration and video content, Instagram Reels are a strong alternative to TikTok.

📲 Experiment with unique content formats

Rather than blanketing all your channels with the same content, lean into their unique strengths. Instagram’s visual aesthetic lends itself perfectly to rich photos and videos. Twitter’s format favors fast and frequent posts and is particularly important to policymakers, media outlets and thought leaders. And recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm prioritize showing content from sources you have interacted with, including friends and businesses.

💬 Two-way conversation is key

Building customer trust and loyalty takes time and resources. Ditch the “post-it-and-forget-it” attitude in favor of two-way conversations with your followers. Create an “if/then” document with templated responses for common follower sentiments. This will help you quickly respond to positive comments or shares, cementing a connection between you and your audiences while driving up engagement.

Setting aside as little as 15 minutes each week to review and respond to account activity will keep you on track, prevent you from being hit with a deluge of overdue notifications and appear more authentic to your audiences. (Bots need not apply)

What tips, tricks and trends are you seeing in social media? Let me know: quentin@goffpublic.com