The Ultimate Social Media Checklist: Get Ready for 2016

I hope next year is better than this year. I’ve heard it about 10 times in the past week alone. I’ve thought it myself, although this year has been fantastic. Because I always want the next year to be just as good if not better. So let me help you make the next year a great social media marketing year for your business, with the ultimate social media checklist.

What should I check to ensure I get the best social media value in 2016?

Here’s your 2016 Social Media Checklist

Do you have a documented plan? This is the biggest question of them all.

You have to know and write down:

1. What digital marketing goals you want to accomplish
2. What digital marketing strategies would be the most effective at meeting that goal, and
3. How to execute those strategies.

A. Review your data

Many of the companies I speak with think they know how to tackle digital marketing. However, they routinely find themselves dissatisfied with their social media results. That’s a sign that you need to stop and rethink your approach. As with most things, if you’re not seeing results, you need to change what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean you should give up, it just means you have to go through the strategy and planning process all over again.

B. Do you know your audiences?

Revisit your audience research:

• What social networks are they using?
• Check trending topics via Google trends.
• Search Reddit and forums to find the burning questions that keep your audience up at night.
• Watch how your target audiences interact on Twitter and Instagram, particularly those who are getting good traction. Watch their language, voice and tone and prepare to emulate them in your content.

C. Translate your business goals into digital marketing goals

You may be hearing me repeat this over and over again–and it’s for good reason. Often we hear from potential clients that they “want to increase revenue”. Well, digital marketing will not directly put money in the bank. That’s why business goals need to be translated into digital marketing goals.

A solid digital marketing goal would be: “to increase our email database by 50% by x date.” The idea here is that email still has the highest ROI so if you get more email addresses, you’ll get more revenue.

So, do you have digital marketing goals for 2016? If not, now’s the time to start setting some.

D. Do you have clear and documented digital marketing strategies to meet these goals?

Here’s the definition of strategy: having a method or a plan to achieve a desired outcome. So do you clearly know how to get there? And, just talking about how you’ll get there is not enough.

According to a Content Marketing Institute study, 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends— North America, “60% of those who have a documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness, compared with 32% of those who have a verbal strategy.”

So, document your plan so you can look forward to milestones and hold yourself accountable to actually executing the strategy. The same CMI study shows businesses report that a document strategy helps track ROI, more so than not having one.

E. Have you set aside the proper time and resources to execute your strategy?

Social media marketing is NOT free, cheap, or easy.

Check the following:

• Are my plans and resources aligned? If you want to do 100 things but you only have 1/4 of a person’s time dedicated to social media marketing, you will want to prioritize and scale back.
• Are my goals realistic given my resources? If you have 10,000 customers but want 100,000 followers on Facebook within a year, be prepared to invest $15,000 in Facebook ads.
• If you want to do digital marketing well but only have one dedicated person, you may want to consider outsourcing. There are generally two scenarios there:
  • 1. You have a director level person but not an execution person. You’ll need one or multiple people with the tactical skills. Here you’ll get more bang for your buck from hiring an agency that can give you the wide range of skills needed, rather than hiring one employee/one set of skills.
  • 2. If you have an execution specialists but not a director, you’ll want to hire someone to do your digital marketing strategic planning.

• Does your bio say what you do for others? How do you help, teach, change the world?
• Does your bio say why you’re interesting, different, unique?
• Does your bio answer the question, “why should I follow you?” or “why should I care about what you have to say?”
• Has anything changed since you last updated it?
• Any new accomplishments you want to add to your LinkedIn?
• Does your profile offer an easy way for people to get in touch with you?

Buffer published the following recipe for an amazing Twitter bio:

• It’s accurate. One professional description.
• It’s exciting. One word that is not boring.
• It’s targeted. One niche descriptor.
• It’s flattering. One accomplishment.
• It’s humanizing. One hobby.
• It’s intriguing. One interesting fact or feature about yourself.
• It’s connected. Your company or another social profile.

Check your social media bio pictures:

• Does your picture make you look human? Yes, this applies to brands too. People buy from people, not brands. Do you look like “people”?
• Do you still look the same as the current picture? I made the mistake of keeping an older picture with a different hair style and when I met people offline, they wouldn’t recognize me. You’ll want to be recognized.
• When is the last time you tested something new? Maybe try a different background color to stand out.
• Is your profile picture friendly? Does it say, “come hither”?
• If you’re in the B2B space, invest in your employees by getting them headshots and encouraging them to use them on LinkedIn

Collect and create “life of the customer” images:

The biggest hurdle we run into is the lack of images to use with social media content. Especially in the retail space, shots of products and shots of your customers’ product experiences are a must. We’re not just talking about catalog-style shots, but genuine customer shots as well. Both for products and services, you want to show the change you make in the life of your customers. Our clients who are most successful at this hire an art director as well as a photographer to come up with scenarios to shoot.

Here is a list of images to get ready for 2016:

• Products in use
  • If you’re selling tea, show people drinking your tea, not just e-commerce shots of the tea packets
  • If you sell software, show people using your software
• Customer reactions while using products or interacting with your services
  • Stay away from stock photos as much as you can. They shout, “fake!” Social media users are very sophisticated and can spot a stock photo from a mile away.
  • Sit down for conversations with your customers, doing a demo of a product or service, and do a photo shoot. For example, if you sell tea, throw a tea party and capture images of the party.
• Employees at work shots
  • Do your employees play in softball leagues? Get some shots of that. Do you host lunch-and-learns? Get shots of those.
  • Include pictures of your workforce in action. Not only does this humanize you online, but it gives your online fans a better sense of who you are as a company and the values you stand for.
• Office and business environmental shots
  • If you’ve invested in new factory equipment, nice office furniture or a new office gym, make sure you show those environments. Pictures of this sort illustrate that you care about your employees as much as you do your products and services, so show it off.

• Get going with ads, it’s the new Facebook reality:
  • Set aside an ads budget. We recommend a minimum of $500 per month, but even just $100 will do.
  • Use the ads budget to promote your most important posts/content, on a weekly basis.
• Mind your three Cs: Consistently publish compelling content:
  • Make sure to publish at least once a day
  • Do you know what your top posts are? Take the time to analyze what makes these posts successful
  • Publish plenty of compelling content with calls to action and links to your website. It helps here if you publish a blog.
  • Are you doing the same things as your competitors? You may want to switch things up a bit.
  • Tone down the salesiness
  • Is your content constantly dressed in a business suit? It may be time to lighten up a bit by introducing some humor and inspirational posts.
• Size your images properly
  • Banner image: Width: 851px Height: 315px scaled down to width: 785px ; Height: 295px
  • Profile image: 150×150 px – gets scaled down to 32×32 px
  • Dreamgrow has a full list of image sizes for other Facebook sections, such as events and more.
  • Pixelied provides the best Facebook Event Cover Size.
• Implement new features such as “call to action” buttons
• Track your data: do you look at “Insights” regularly?

• Mind the four Cs: Consistent, compelling, conversational content
  • Use the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content should be conversational (@mentions and retweets), only 20% should be posts and content distribution.
  • Are you publishing your original content multiple times?
  • @mention interested parties to get their eyes on your content.
  • Participate in chats.
• Monitor your target audiences
  • What would the bio of those you’re trying to impress say?
  • Search for them by bio keywords, add them to a list
  • Watch what they’re doing.
  • What are they into, what are they tweeting about?
• Use the lists feature to organize your targets. Are you monitoring these lists?
• Use tools like Hootsuite that give you the ability to geotarget.
• Upload images with your text and make sure they’re the right size (440Xx220 px)
• Invite action. Don’t forget to ask for retweets, clicks and comments.

• Choose a “face” to the company. Identify a company representative to be the face of the company on LinkedIn. Yes, we recommend a personal presence on LinkedIn.
• Train your employees on how to use LinkedIn, especially if you’re in the B2B space.
• Use professionally-done profile photos. Make sure your and your company leaders’ profile pictures are professionally done, and in a friendly setting. Avoid studio photos. Also avoid party and family photos… It’s just common sense.
• Regularly post updates to your company’s LinkedIn page. Keep in mind, unless you’re a large company, your page will mostly attract people who are keeping an eye on job opportunities.
• Regularly post updates through personal accounts.
• Use LinkedIn publisher to share lessons and other content of interest to your network.
  • Do not replace your blog with LinkedIn publisher, but do recycle blog posts.
  • Don’t forget to link back to your website within these Publisher articles.
  • Mix up the tags you use for your Publisher articles to identify ones that give your more exposure in the LinkedIn Pulse feed.
• Connect with all business contacts you meet. Yes, connect, connect, connect.
• Install the rapportive app, which will allow you to invite people to connect, from your gmail inbox, as you’re emailing with them. You won’t miss another LinkedIn connection this way.
• Use the search function to find conversations from your targets and comment on them.
• Write inMail messages to targets who look at your profile, say hi, and ask how you can help them.
• Join the groups where your targets hang out. Max out your groups. Why not?
• Participate in groups by commenting at first, then, after gaining the trust of group moderators, post content. Stick with educational content, that links to your website (yes, you’ll want to blog) and stay away from promotional posts. Do this a few times a week.

• Use filters sparingly, don’t overly process your photos.
• Share real photos, that look like real life – No stock photography!
• Remember, it’s INSTAgram, it’s meant to capture moments, so make your stream real, with a series of moments, not ad-like content.
• Do your hashtag research.
• Mix up hashtags – use hashtags related to your products and your audience’s interests.
• Tag your local business in the location field.
• Do mention and tag other interested parties, just make sure the content is relevant and flattering to them.
• Make sure your URL is in the bio.
• Direct people to your bio if you want them to click over to your site.

• Enable rich pins for your site:
  • Rich Pins add extra details to Pins from your website. Right now, there are five types of Rich Pins: movie, recipe, article, product and place.
• Use keywords-rich text.
• Don’t forget to add links (especially if you don’t have rich pins enabled).
• Pin from original content hosted on your own website. This implies that if you choose to use Pinterest, you must publish original content.
• Pin, repin and comment frequently to gain “friends.”
• Use images at 735 pixels wide (which is the width of an expanded pin).

Your accounts shouldn’t be so tightly locked down to where people can’t find you. If you’re online to generate business, then make sure people can find and contact you. Especially on LinkedIn, private LinkedIn profiles are no good for business. Remember, social media is called social media for a reason. If you don’t feel like being social, stay offline, but be ready to be offline and alone.

What else should we add to this social media checklist?