You Ask, I Answer: Agency Social Media Marketing Strategy?

In today's episode, Taryn asks, what do you or do your company post on company social media? Uh if you work in an agency, uh, do you share client work and updates back uh behind the scenes and company culture of the agency to appeal to new hires? I mix of both. It's a good question. Um it depends.

It depends on the audience, the channel, the overall strategy, things like that. One of the things that is really helpful to uh in terms of marketing your agency on social media is setting clear purpose. What do you get from this channel? So uh Trust Insights, for example, uh Twitter mostly is going to be uh syndicated industry news. Same with LinkedIn.

Um LinkedIn actually gets a syndicated copy of uh you ask I answer videos as well. And that's because the audiences on those platforms are are expecting and behave like uh audiences that want heavy business content. Uh things like articles we find useful and informative uh when it comes to uh data and analytics, which is what we mostly uh uh work with. YouTube and Instagram for us tend to be about events. Um so posting conference videos, snippets, uh live interviews and things from events that we're at, because we go to a lot of events.

Uh we speak at a lot of events, and so those channels, that's sort of the intent there. Uh so that that purpose matters most to know what it is that the audience expects. The other thing you have to think about is what is the audience, how do they behave on those channels? Uh when you're on Instagram, for example, uh you're you know, you you got the whole you know, thumb thing going just scrolling through your feet as as quick as possible or swiping through your stories. And so that's a place where it is almost completely visual content, uh no super heavy uh chunks of text.

Uh same with Facebook, although our our analytics on Facebook have been so appalling that you know it's at this point the only reason we post to Facebook is we haven't removed from Agora Pulse yet. Um deciding that purpose matters the most. Second thing that's really important is to uh set really good measurement goals. Right. If you set up a channel and you said this is going to be our uh behind the scenes channel, and you're posting and then you look at your analytics and and it's a flat line, the audience there isn't responding to that.

Um so change your strategy. One really important thing to do that not enough people is uh ask the audiences on that channel what they want from you on that channel. Just you know, run a poll, run a uh survey, uh maybe even put a few ad dollars behind it just to make sure people who are subscribed to you can see it. But ask them like hey, you follow us, you're in our audience, whatever. What do you want to hear?

What do you want to see? What would be a value to you? And that will help you triangulate on that channel's impact as well. Third thing I would recommend doing is at least for those channels where you can get the data. LinkedIn is not one of them, but uh certainly YouTube, uh Twitter, uh Facebook, Instagram, you can get competitive data.

So if there are competing agencies in your space, uh, you can extract that data from them using a number of different third party tools, and get a sense for what really works for those other agencies. So if you're saying like a public relations agency, put together a list in uh something like Talk Walker uh or uh crowd tangle, and look at what they post, look at what gets them the highest levels of engagement. Look at the top 20 or 30 posts, or maybe the top 25%, and get a sense of is it content that is about you know behind the scenes, is it client stuff? What is it that that resonates most? And that will give you a good sense of what that industry's general audience is looking for.

So those are sort of three steps figuring out your purpose, validating that purpose with measurement, uh, and then looking at competitive in order to see uh are others other similar audiences like that. The competitive one I think is one people don't do enough of and they overlook because it is much more difficult and time intensive to do. But it's how you're going to grow because if you have a good sense of this is what our competitors are doing and what's working for them, then you may be able to uh take some market share away from them, at least in terms of attention, attention that they get on social media. Now if your competitors engagement metrics are all appallingly low, then you have to consider maybe they're doing it wrong as a collective. Groupthink within uh an industry is not uncommon, especially the agency world, because people in the agency world uh job hop like crazy, and so you can get a very homogenous culture in a region.

All the agencies' social media starts to behave the same because in some cases that person that you know uh manager or director or vice president has been at like seven of the agencies in the area uh in like the last four years. And so all those practices tend to be homogenous. So use that as a a uh a warning sign too. If everybody's content looks the same and everybody's uh metrics look the same, then you have an opportunity to do something different and perhaps gain some market share that uh everyone is ignoring. So something to think about.

Lots lots to think about. But that's would be my recommendation. Set the purpose, measure the purpose, and compare the purpose, and uh see how you do. Uh if you have any follow-up questions, please leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel of the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.