Social Media - Best Practices
Embedding Social
Here is a quick guide to embed social posts on your website
Facebook is ideal for sharing any kind of media, from video to text updates to links to your website. It is less reliant on visuals than Instagram, but keeping your account’s posting style consistent and branded is strongly recommended.
Cadence:
- A minimum of 2-3 times per week is ideal, but the most important thing is consistency.
- Whether you post 1x per week or 20x, your audience will get to realize this (versus unfollowing or dropping out of their feeds because you posted 4 times one day and then not again for another six months. – This is true for any social platform.)
General recommendations:
- Take advantage of ‘deep links’ - where Facebook pulls information in for you.
Ideally, this means that any link you’re sharing has a nice image and headline. The YOAST SEO tool in WordPress sites allows you to customize these headlines for Facebook and Twitter. - Share existing, external content. You can do this by going to any Facebook page, choosing a post and copying the URL to your page. You can then type in your caption.
- Note: by taking the post URL instead of using the “share to page” button, you can schedule the post to be published anytime, if you don’t want to do it in real-time. (Ie: schedule some content for the weekend/evenings.)
- It’s best to avoid duplicate content, but you can also use the same image templates from Canva for Facebook, just modify them slightly and choose the right sizes for Facebook. (See specs in Tools & Resources below.)
Great for sharing highly visual content and building engagement. This social platform encourages engagement and interaction with your audience.
Cadence:
- Post frequently and consistently. If resources allow, daily Stories and a minimum of 2x week on the feed.
- When promoting an event or contest, more is more! Note any important dates and build up your posting to get the most content ready to promote your key dates.
- When promoting an event or contest, more is more! Note any important dates and build up your posting to get the most content ready to promote your key dates.
Recommendations:
- Make sure your account is a Business account (in the settings)
- Post frequently and consistently.
- When promoting an event or contest, more is more! Note any important dates and build up your posting to get the most content ready to promote your key dates.
- When promoting an event or contest, more is more! Note any important dates and build up your posting to get the most content ready to promote your key dates.
- Instagram Stories & Reels
- Over 1B users visit Stories and/or Reels on Instagram every day so you will want to factor this into your organic and paid strategy.
- The Instagram algorithm prioritizes stories that use built-in features like questions, polls, and quizzes, so incorporate these into your Stories.
- You can also easily share user-generated content that your followers tag you in.
- Over 1B users visit Stories and/or Reels on Instagram every day so you will want to factor this into your organic and paid strategy.
- Reply to comments, encourage dialogue and discussion
- Tag accounts that might follow you back or have similar audiences
- Have fun with the copy! Vary the length - try short posts vs. longer posts
- Vary the type of content you share. Popular options are:
- Reels/Videos — including “how to” and sneak previews
- Carousels — multi-image posts
- Single image posts
- Text posts
- Message prompts or inspirational quotes
- Quotes from your team
- Quotes or screenshots of comments or reviews from followers/customers
- Message prompts or inspirational quotes
- Reels/Videos — including “how to” and sneak previews
Hashtags
Use hashtags in your bio and on your posts. They help categorize your content for Instagram’s algorithm, as well as being a way for users to manually search for you.
- In your bio, it’s important to include your location and commonly used search terms or phrases.
- In posts, using common terms and including any trending events or national holidays will give your post more organic reach.
- We recommend keeping a standard “set” that you copy and paste each time and then update it to add any relevant additional hashtags that match your content.
- Along with using your branded hashtags, you can also include those that would be relevant to people interested in the content.
Twitter is the best platform for sharing news and straightforward information.
Cadence:
- A minimum of 1-5 Tweets per day is common, but whatever your organization’s resources and goals are will help shape this. A news organization would tweet far more often than an indie boutique shop, for example. Similar to other platforms, find a manageable consistency.
Recommendations:
- Simplicity works best, but with a news-worthy focus. Think of tweets like headlines and try to craft short, informative, catchy copy.
- It’s also important to consider that most Twitter users look at Twitter on their phones, so any text on images should be either limited or large enough to be clear on mobile. There are several Canva templates for Twitter posts that can be helpful as well.
- To help organize and structure your Tweet schedule, we recommend using a tool called Buffer (more on this below) to schedule Tweets that have basic information.
YouTube
YouTube, of course, is for sharing videos. These videos can be edited and produced or live, and they range from being extremely short (YouTube Shorts) to longer episodic or documentary-style videos.
Cadence:
- For YouTubers, releasing videos on a set schedule is common/best practice - ie: “See a new video every Tuesday”.
- Live Streaming can be event-based or also on a standard schedule - everything from weekly to daily.
- For organizations, if your video content is going to be sporadic, we recommend considering promoting your video with YouTube advertising.
Recommendations:
- YouTube categories their videos as: Under 4 mins, 4-20mins or Over 20mins - consider where your content will best fit. In marketing, generally shorter is better.
- Be very strategic and targeted with your video descriptions and headlines. Think about what your audience is most likely to click on after searching for content like yours. (Do some peer research to get inspiration.)
- Customize your video thumbnail to ensure its “clickability” factor is high. You can also test different thumbnails and use YouTube analytics to see which one is performing better.
TikTok
The current dominator of the “short” video clip, TikTok has recently extended its video duration limit to 10 minutes. However, the focus is generally on short, engaging, creative videos that splice together content with popular music or sound effects and filters.
Cadence:
For organizations, focusing on the quality and style of your TikToks is key but the platform itself recommends posting 1-4x per day.
Recommendations:
- Our top tip for brands/ads/organizations on TikTok is don’t try to mimic the popular style or try too hard to fit into what the top creators are doing. As this platform is the newest, fastest growing and has the youngest overall demographic, it is arguably most important to find your organization’s “voice” for TikTok. This can include things like fonts, music styles, language, etc.
- Experimentation will be key! Try things out and see what works best for your organization and that remains authentic to your brand.
- The younger generation appreciates substance and will have a high awareness of brands that are creating content that is meant to manipulate versus engage.
Tools & Resources
2023 social media sizes
Canva
This is a free, easy-to-use design tool. There are pre-made templates for all social media platforms. You can choose anyone you like and customize it by clicking to change colours, add photos, and other fun elements.
There are a variety of Canva tutorials here.
Buffer
The free version of Publish by Buffer allows you to schedule social media posts to help keep everything organized in one place. You can assign dates and times to different content, and customize it for each platform - including the copy, photo or video.
This is great to use when you have specific content for deadlines, such as when the contest is opening and closing, and any other time-sensitive announcements you want to make.
The upgraded version provides an option for scheduling Instagram stories, more admin control and slots for draft content. There’s also a reporting tool called Analyze that tracks performance and engagement.
Linktree
This is a popular tool to use alongside Instagram. Since there’s only room for one link in your Instagram bio, it is helpful to have a free Linktree account, so that you can share links to different types of content. You can do some light customization, including choosing a colour that aligns with your brand.