Posts in category: Knowledge Base

Have you been struggling to figure out how Pinterest could help to market your eCommerce business?

No doubt, Pinterest provides a huge opportunity for eCommerce businesses to promote their businesses.

The visual nature of Pinterest makes it perfect for promoting products. In addition to sharing images from your store, you can pin other sites’ products or links. It not only helps you to increase engagement and sales but also builds a strong brand name.

If you’ve been ignoring Pinterest until now, here are a few Pinterest statistics to get you thinking.

• Shopping is a top priority for 48% of Pinterest users
• Pins that show a product or service in action are 67% more likely to drive sales
• Interaction with organic Pinterest shopping pins has increased by 44%
• 87% of people on Pinterest have bought a product because of Pinterest, while 93% use Pinterest to plan a future purchase.

If you want to make the most out of Pinterest for your eCommerce business, follow the below guide on how to use Pinterest for eCommerce to drive sales.

1. Categorize Your Product Under Different Boards

First of all, you need to start by setting up your Pinterest boards.

Start with categorizing the content on your Pinterest profile, just as you would on your eCommerce site.

Almost all eCommerce businesses deal with various products belonging to different categories. Therefore, you have to create different boards to pin different categories of products.

If you categorize the products, not only will it help people to browse through your products, but it also helps them to follow your board as per their interest. This way, people can find the exact products that they are looking for. This puts legitimate shoppers in your crosshairs.

Look at how Michael Kors, a top clothing brand, uses Pinterest for some effective naming inspiration and categorization.

You can also create a simple board using keywords such as “Clothes For Women” or “Designs For Bedroom.” Additionally, you may even name it using any seasonal approach, such as “Get Set For Festivals” or other ideas, depending on your brand or business requirements.

2. Share Appealing And Visual Content

Pinterest is a visual platform. Therefore, sharing interesting, engaging, and appealing content is important. It will encourage new followers to re-pin your content and help get more eyes on your products.

Here are a few tips to make your Pinterest content engaging:

• Pick a strong cover image for video pins
• Use overlay text and captions
• Show your brand personality
• Double-check your pin specs before posting
• Write a clear and SEO-optimized (more on this later) pin copy and description

Look how Levi’s checks all the points while creating its pins; an appealing right sized-image with overlay texts, along with the “Shop Now” CTA, is a perfect mix to drive shoppers to buy the products.

One more thing,

Be creative when sharing content on Pinterest and check which types of content gain more engagement from your target audience than others.

You can also use Pinterest analytics to find out what drives traffic most. If you have added the “Pin It” button, you’ll be able to see what people are pinning from your website and re-pinning from your boards. Use this information so you can create more of it.

3. Add Relevant Keyword In Your Description

On Pinterest, the description of your pins does more than just summarize your product on display.

How? Remember, Pinterest is a mix of social media and search engines. And where the term “Search” is involved, the keyword concept will follow.

The same is the case on Pinterest.

If you add relevant keywords in your product description, people searching with the same query will find your pin to engage with.

Therefore, whenever you write your pin descriptions, ensure you apply the keyword most people would use to find your content.

Look how Ikea showcased their latest home decor products by simply adding the keyword “home decor” into their pin descriptions and titles. People searching for “home decor” will find their pins and follow them. More followers mean more exposure and more sales!

4. Use Rich Pins

Rich Pins are pretty helpful. There are different types of Rich Pins, and the ones most widely used by eCommerce owners are product pins.

With Product pins, Pinterest can pull additional information about the stuff you pin, making your pins much more dynamic and informative!

Product pins make shopping via Pinterest a lot easier. Unlike a regular pin, these pins show where the product you are pinning can be purchased, the current price, and the direct link to the product page.

Also, the product pins prices are updated in real-time, and if any user pins the product pin on their board, they will be notified when the price is updated. In short, it is a great way to convert your visitors into buyers.

To use Rich Pins, follow the two simple steps:

Step 1: Include the proper metadata to your website content. This metadata differs for each type of Rich Pin, so you must add multiple rich pin types to your site, and Pinterest will prioritize them.

Step 2: Authenticate your Rich Pins and apply to get them on Pinterest. Once you’ve completed step one, you must enter your site’s URL into Pinterest’s validator page to ensure there are no mistakes with the metadata. After everything is finalized, you can click “Apply Now.” Find out more on Pinterest’s developer’s page.

6. Schedule Your Pins

Like all other social networks, a consistent sharing strategy is important on Pinterest to get in the eyes of your product aficionados.

But consistency is hard to get if your marketing arsenal is not stacked with social media scheduling tools, such as SocialPilot.

With SocialPilot’s Pinterest scheduling feature:

• You can save time and effort by evenly spacing out your pinning strategy throughout the day, week, or a month in advance inside a social media calendar
• Schedule your pins to maintain your presence easily and engage with your audience
• Onboard and collaborate with your marketing team for a smoother workflow

Whether you want to share your product image or content, you can easily create your posting strategies for the future according to your requirement. The good thing about SocialPilot is that it gives you a Pinterest alike experience to create and schedule your pins.

Look at its post-composer! You get specific tabs for each network, so you can take care of the nuisance of different platforms while scheduling posts for them all at once.

Loving what you just read? Wait till you try SocialPilot hands-on for free.

Are you ready to sell?

So there you have it! Tips to help increase your eCommerce sales through Pinterest.

While we’ve only scratched the surface here, we hope these tips will give you a good starting point for your own Pinterest marketing strategy.

And don’t forget, if making pins and managing boards sound like too much work (or if you just want more traffic to your pins), SocialPilot can take care of all that for you.

With our easy-to-use platform, all you need is a little bit of creativity, and we will take care of the publishing part.

Effective email and newsletter marketing is crucial for a nonprofit organization’s (NPO) success. With scarce resources, limited staffing, and divided leadership attention, investing in marketing efforts can often take a backseat to more urgent matters.

The key to successful marketing on Twitter is consistency—the kind of consistency that doesn’t lack quality.

But let’s be honest, it sometimes gets hectic to maintain tweet consistency and quality.

And you, as a social media marketer, must be facing the same problem.

The recent transition from handling a single account to managing multiple social media platforms can take a toll on your performance.

But what can you do to maintain an active and qualified Twitter presence while efficiently conducting other day-to-day job activities?

Well, you can learn how to schedule tweets!

Scheduling Twitter posts keep you ahead of time so you can always have your feeds filled with quality content without the hassle of manual posting, and there are two ways to do it.

1. Third-party Twitter scheduling using SocialPilot
2. Scheduling tweets natively on Twitter

This blog will discuss how to schedule a Twitter post using these tools like a pro marketer.

Let’s dive in.

How to Schedule Tweets with SocialPilot?

Before we continue, you have got to sign-up for the 14-day free trial of SocialPilot. Dont worry, it will take just a second and requires no credit card details. This will help you understand how to schedule Twitter posts practically.

As far as the scheduling is concerned, SocialPilot lets you schedule, draft, review, and manage multiple tweets from different Twitter accounts from a single dashboard.

Moreover, it also gives you the ability to bulk schedule up to 500 tweets at once, which we will discuss briefly later in this article.

But first,

Let’s see the 3 easy steps to schedule a tweet after linking your profile in SocialPilot.

Step 1: Craft Your Tweet

Click on ‘Create Post’ from the SocialPilot dashboard then compose your tweet.

Here, you can create your tweet just as you do on Twitter. To make your tweet more engaging, customize it by adding different multimedia options available, such as videos, single or multiple images, Gifs, and emojis.

Moreover, you can give your tweet additional location context to reach out to a new audience or participate in the local conversation for better targeting.

You can also reach out to other accounts by adding “@” followed by their profile name in your tweet to get more reach and engagement.

Further, you can create and customize UTM parameters and add them to the links you share on Twitter.

Step 2: Select Your Twitter Accounts

Once you are done crafting your tweet, it is time to select the Twitter account for which you want the tweet to be published (You need to add accounts first in the app).

Navigate to the right to select the post’s destination Twitter account . You can also schedule the same tweet for other social media platforms that you will find in the “Select Accounts” section just by checking the box beside their name.

That’s how you can create one piece of content for multiple social media platforms and share it at once.

But remember,

You can schedule a tweet for only a single account at time. This is because Twitter’s APIs consider using the same tweet for multiple accounts as spamming. However, you can always recreate the post and share it on other Twitter handles.

Step 3: Schedule Your Tweet

Now, scheduling your tweet is just a one-click task, but let us take you through all the options available for publishing your post:

Add to queue: You can use this option to schedule your tweet for the next available time according to your pre-set schedule.

Share Now: No time in between, Instant sharing.

Share Next: This option will put your tweet on the top of the queue to be sent next.

Repeat Post: To schedule the same tweet on repeat multiple times across multiple days.

Voila! Now you know how to schedule a tweet perfectly ahead of time so it gets published without any mishaps.

Now imagine the things you can focus on once you can pre-schedule your tweet. It keeps your posting consistency intact and releases you of the hassle of posting manually.

However, scheduling regularly for multiple accounts on various platforms can sometimes prove to be too much to handle.

Don’t worry, we have guessed your plight and have the perfect solution at hand!

How to Schedule Multiple Tweets in Bulk?

As a social media marketer, you have an obligation to your clients to manage and promote upcoming events and product launches on social media. While doing so, you have to ensure a daily dose of content by scheduling multiple tweets for different clients throughout the month.

Needless to say,

You will have the whole month’s tweets already planned in a spreadsheet to be published.

In that case, scheduling each post individually would be a drag.

We have a solution – the bulk schedule feature!

SocialPilot’s bulk schedule feature allows you to schedule up to 500 images, text or article link tweets at once using a CSV file, saving you from wasting a colossal amount of time.

Isn’t that amazing?

Besides Twitter, you get the bulk scheduling feature for multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, etc.

Let’s break down the process of scheduling multiple tweets at once with bulk scheduling using SocialPilot.

Step 1: Upload Your CSV File

Scheduling these many tweets is easier done than said. All you have to do is drag and drop or click in the dotted square box to upload the CSV file.

Step 2: Review the Posts

When dealing with so many tweets, it is better to have a last-minute check before scheduling them.

Thereby, once your CSV file is uploaded, you will be directed to the preview window.

You can review all the posts alongside their images and make any required edits here.

Moreover, you can see all the posts with an assigned account in the CSV file and the tweets that don’t have an account given yet.

Further, you can select the accounts for all the posts with no account assigned.

Now, click on the “Select Account” button.

Step 3: Bulk Schedule Multiple Tweets in One Click

You are all set. Click on the “Schedule post.”

Your bulk posts are all scheduled and ready to publish once their time comes.

How to Schedule Tweets on Mobile?

There will be days when you will have to work on the go. And Twitter doesn’t allow you to schedule tweets from its mobile application.

In such a case having a Twitter scheduling tool like SocialPilot, which enables you to schedule tweets on mobile through application, is a blessing.

Let’s see how to schedule tweets on mobile through SocialPilot.

Step 1: Login and Write Your Tweet

You can get the SocialPilot application on Android Play Store and App store.

Log in to your SocialPilot account through our mobile phone application and tap on the “Create Post” button in the left side menu.

It will open up the post composer for you, where you can craft your tweet.

You can also add an image, video, or GIF to accompany your tweet.

Step 2: Select the Account

Once your tweet is crafted, tap on the “Select Account” bar to open the list of social media accounts you have connected with SocialPilot.

Here, select the Twitter account on which the tweet will be published and tap on the “✔” button.

Step 3: Schedule the Twitter Post

Now all that is left is to schedule your tweet at the right time and date. Simply tap on the “Schedule post” in the bottom menu and select the time and date.

Yay! You have scheduled Twitter posts on mobile.

How to Manage Posts after Scheduling?

Once you are done scheduling your tweets, they get queued into another section called “Manage posts.”

What can you do in this section?

Here you can get a clear picture of every scheduled and bulk-scheduled post. This section will give you complete control over your posts even after being scheduled.

Let’s briefly look at all the categories in “Manage Posts” section and the features available in the.

Queued Posts: It gives you the listicle view of all your scheduled posts and their posting time, date, and destined social media platform. Here you can edit the contents, delete, duplicate, or reschedule the post.

Unscheduled: You will find your posts in this tab for two reasons only: if you had added a post in the queue without having a time slot defined for an account If you had scheduled more posts than your account limit.

Delivered: Under this tab, you will find all the posts already published using SocialPilot.

Error: You will find all the posts rejected by the social media APIs under this tab. Fret not; you can always modify and schedule them again.

Pending Approval: Did I tell you about SocialPilot’s team management feature? No, check it out. Under this tab, you will find all the posts that are yet to be approved by the account’s admin.

How to Schedule Tweets Using the Twitter Scheduler?

Twitter also has its native scheduler, which gives Twitter users the capability of scheduling and managing their tweets efficiently.

Let’s see the step-by-step process of scheduling tweets using the Twitter scheduler.

Step 1: To get started, go to your home screen and click on the big blue “Tweet” button at the bottom of the menu on the left side of the screen. You can also click on the tweet composer to create your tweet.

Step 2: Now, start writing your tweet in the post composer. Here, you can add different media options to your tweets, such as images, videos, Twitter cards, or polls.

Step 3: Now, schedule your tweet using the calendar at the bottom, asking you to choose publishing time and date – you can select a date up to a year in advance. Fill in and confirm it, and then click on the “Schedule” button.

Conclusion – How to Schedule Tweets

In this competitive era of social media marketing, having a tool to schedule Twitter posts in your marketing tool stack is more of a necessity than a mere option.

Whether you are a social media intern at a firm or handling multiple accounts at your agency, using a tweet scheduler will make your life so much easier.

The benefits of scheduling tweets? – a lot.

You are reaching your audience at the right time, getting more engagement, and having more productivity.

What more could you ask?

Start using SocialPilot to manage the whole nine yards of Twitter scheduling and achieve your Twitter marketing goals.

The proof is in the performance

Advertisers who switch to data-driven attribution from another attribution model typically see a 6% average increase in conversions. With data-driven attribution, machine learning algorithms assign fractional credit to customer touch points which may have previously been undervalued. Smart Bidding can then react to these opportunities, resulting in performance gains.

Last year, for example, Mercedes-Benz Germany drove growth by implementing Smart Bidding with data-driven attribution. Originally, the company ran conversions using a last-click attribution model. With the help of their agency TeamX and Google’s best practices, Mercedes-Benz Germany, set up an experiment across multiple campaigns to test which bidding strategy, Maximize conversions or Maximize clicks, would perform better with data-driven attribution.

After running the experiment for six weeks, the campaigns using data-driven attribution with Maximize conversions saw a 37% increase in conversions.

“The performance results speak for themselves. We have proven that the combination of conversion based bidding and data-driven attribution increases performance significantly. The attribution model also helps us to distinguish better between the impact of brand and generic campaigns. This experiment is a milestone for Mercedes. “
— Katrin Thorant, Deputy Director Activation SEA, TeamX

Mercedes-Benz Germany has since upgraded all of its conversions to data-driven attribution and scaled out the use of Smart Bidding across all campaigns. The company has also scaled Smart Bidding and data-driven attribution across other business units within Germany and are now utilizing other Smart Bidding strategies such as Target CPA. Data-driven attribution continues to be an important part of the company’s marketing strategy.

According to a recent study, social media managers work between 41-59 hours per week, which is more than the accepted standards.

If you’re a social media marketer, you know the situation firsthand.

Considering how complex and overwhelming social media marketing has become, social media marketers must rely on technology to drive results.

That’s where using a social media dashboard is so crucial. These are designed to help these busy bees become more productive by streamlining tasks, analyzing data, and boosting your social media engagement.

That said, not all social media dashboards are designed equally. They may vary in user-friendliness, design, and features.

Then, how do you choose the right one for your business or clients?

This post will discuss the 10 most important features every good social media dashboard must have.

But, before that, let’s shed some light on why you should even use one.

Why Should You Use Social Media Dashboards?

Let’s examine some of the major benefits of using a social media dashboard.

1. Improve Productivity

Time is of great essence for social media marketers, and social media dashboards can help them do a lot more with greater efficiency. You can juggle multiple tasks much more easily, as multiple social channels can be integrated into a simple platform.

2. Schedule Posts

With the help of social media dashboards, you can queue up your posts for the week in bulk on multiple social channels within a couple of hours. Schedule them, and the tool will publish them automatically.

3. Monitor and Track

A social media dashboard can help you monitor and track hashtags, keywords, mentions, and competitor activities in one place without going to individual social channels.

4. Analyze Data

Social media dashboards can help you stay on top of your analytical data by analyzing it based on the key social media metrics you’ve set. You can integrate it with the right type of CRM software to make cloud storage of the data. The insights drawn can help you make more data-driven decisions.

5. Collaborate

Collaboration is a primary requirement for social media marketing. When responsibilities are divided among different people, a social media dashboard can help the users collaborate more efficiently, eliminating confusion or delay.

Now that you understand the benefits of using social media dashboard let’s look at 10 must-have features you should look out for.

1. Manage Multiple Profiles

One of the fundamental features all social media dashboards must have is compatibility with all major social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others.

How does that help?

Let’s say you want to inform your audience about a detailed Semrush review you’ve recently published. With the help of a social media dashboard, you can create and publish posts on multiple channels with a single click.

Choose the most relevant channels for your business and use the social media dashboard to focus your efforts on them.

2. Social Media Content Scheduler

A good social media dashboard tool should allow you to create, customize, and schedule posts on multiple social channels in simple steps.

You must look for these advanced features to use the platform to its full potential.

Here’s what you need.

• Bulk scheduler: With this, you can quickly schedule dozens of posts on multiple channels.
• Schedule editing: Sometimes, you want to reshuffle the scheduled posts to prioritize certain posts. A social media dashboard should allow you to easily edit the schedule details and adjust the publishing queue.
• Reschedule evergreen content: If you have evergreen content worthy of being published several times, your social media dashboard should automatically allow you to republish the post at certain intervals.

Using this powerful feature on SocialPilot, Elevation Brands could scale up the number of clients it had and, as a result, increased its profit too.

3. Display Your Social Media Calendar

Social media dashboards are fundamentally designed to give you a visual overview of how your activities are planned across multiple channels. It is basically your social media calendar.

A good tool should display a weekly calendar which is further divided into a daily calendar that contains posts scheduled for each social media platform with their timings, as seen in this dashboard by SocialPilot.

This is a great feature to keep your content well-organized. If there are gaps in your schedule or the posts are scheduled too close to each other, you can easily spot and rejig the publishing queue.

This can help you enhance the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and drive better engagement.

4. Monitor Campaign Performance

Once your posts are live, you’ll need a good social media dashboard to help you monitor several performance metrics of these posts that can help you improve your conversion rate.

Measuring your campaign performance is important to understand if it was successful. You can calculate your return on investment (ROI) only if you measure the campaign performance.

Additionally, this measurement can help inform your future marketing decisions so you can put your marketing budget to better use.

Finally, regular campaign performance measurement can help you derive insights that you can use to optimize your campaign.

Here are some top metrics that you need to monitor and track regularly.

• Engagement rate
• Reach
• Link clicks
• Number of shares
• Comments
• Brand mentions
• Likes and views

5. Social Media CRM

Did you know that social media dashboards can be used to strengthen your relationship with your existing and potential customers too?

That’s right.

A good social media dashboard should also serve as your social media CRM.

Using it, you can quickly respond to comments, queries, and direct messages from the dashboard. You should also be able to automate your responses based on predetermined rules.

The modern-day customer expects brands to respond to their messages and concerns at the earliest.

Not doing so can hamper their experience and may cause them to stop doing business with you. But when you reply to them quickly with a CRM, you win their trust and also show that you care for them. And that’s why a social CRM is a must-have.

6. Social Listening

Social listening is a powerful technique to understand customer and audience sentiments.

As important as it is to monitor direct engagement with users, you should also keenly monitor conversations around your brand and products or services.

The social media dashboard that you choose should be able to track both tagged and untagged mentions of your brand and help you see those conversations.

Along with this, you should be able to track several keywords or phrases related to your niche, region, or even competitors to gauge customer sentiments around them. This can be very helpful in building a positive brand reputation and credibility on social media.

7. Provide In-Depth Analytics

Social media analytics is much more than tracking likes, shares, or mentions.

To truly leverage the data for your benefit, you need to dive deep into analytics, and the social media dashboard that you choose should assist you with this comprehensively.

You should be able to track metrics like new followers, top-performing posts, the best time to post, page impressions, leads generated, and much more in real-time to create highly-targeted campaigns.

Using this data, you can conduct detailed analysis for every social channel, like comparing Instagram followers vs. following, YouTube view times, and so on.

Now, remember your Facebook metrics might be different than that of Twitter or YouTube. So you need to choose them wisely while comparing.

8. Capture Audience Demographic Data

The social media dashboard you choose should go a step further and help you identify the audience demographic data for each client.

Some of the key metrics include:

• Number of new followers
• Age
• Gender
• Region/Country
• Device used
• The time when they are active

Such data helps you get a detailed insight into your client’s target audiences, and this can help you craft campaigns that can impact them better.

9. Collaborate With Your Team

This feature is vital for social media agencies. As different users will be working on multiple projects, the social media dashboards you consider should allow them to collaborate on projects at an advanced level.

To optimize workflow and enjoy seamless collaboration, the platform should allow them to create multiple dashboards, share calendars in real time, and keep everyone updated about the campaign details.

Such a social media dashboard will ensure that teams can achieve a lot more in the given time.

10. Generate Rich Reports

Generating social media marketing reports can be time-consuming, considering how complicated they can get.

If your social media dashboards can help you generate informative and visually appealing reports like reports for sales, there is nothing like it!

A solid social media dashboard should allow you to customize your reports, generate reports for each channel, and provide a comparative analysis to inform your clients about all your efforts and achievements clearly.

Ready to Choose the Right Social Media Dashboard?

Now you know what to look for in a social media dashboard to ensure it helps achieve your goals.

While most social media dashboards have some standard features, what sets them apart are the advanced features they offer.

As a marketer or a social media agency, you need to go for the one that offers the features you need, can complement your digital marketing tools, and also fits your budget.

For instance, SocialPilot has many features like a social media calendar, bulk scheduling, social inbox, connecting to 50+ accounts and scheduling posts, and more. All of this makes it a must-have tool for every social media marketer.

Go ahead and analyze several social media dashboards based on the features I have discussed and make a wise choice.

Meta tags can be used to increase the visibility of a website on search engines, so they’re undeniably important for SEO.

There are around 4.59 billion social media users, so it’s not surprising that social media marketing is a key focus for marketing professionals, especially as this number is only set to increase.

However, juggling LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts can be tricky.

Not only can there be scheduling issues, but it can also be difficult to maintain consistency and present a unified brand identity.

This is something that can impact your bottom line.

With a social media style guide can make your brand globally recognizable like it has for companies such as Audi, Starbucks, and Ben & Jerry’s. As a matter of fact, a consistent brand image can increase a company’s revenue by 23%. It can also

Read on to find out how you can create your own guide and the benefits it could bring to your company.

What Is a Social Media Style Guide?

A social media style guide is a set of rules that determines the social media activity of your brand.

It might include:

• Tone of voice and language
• Design elements such as color schemes and imagery
• Names of key contacts for social media activity
• Rules for engaging with comments and public activity
• A schedule or posting frequency
• Guidelines for collecting and processing analytics

Some social media guides are comprehensive, while others leave more room for creativity and interpretation.

Including more detail in your style guide can be helpful if there is particular language or images you want to be used across all of your social media activity.

Any number of people might have input on a social media style guide, including:

• Content and copy specialists
• Designers and visual marketing personnel
• Individuals that manage sales leads generated from social media
• Clients (for agencies)

For this reason, it’s a good idea to keep your guide simple to start with.

The critical thing to remember is that these guides exist to make your social media activity easier for your team.

How to Produce a Social Media Style Guide?

Every team produces its social media guide slightly differently, but there are a few key things to keep in mind.

Based on the platform

Firstly, you need to know where your audience is online and which platforms you plan to use.

For example, if your target market primarily uses Instagram and Pinterest, they will be a highly visual audience.

For this reason, you’ll likely want to produce high-quality visuals and avoid wasting resources on copy-heavy platforms like Twitter.

The platforms will dictate a large part of your technical style guide, including:

• Image sizes
• Use of hashtags and tags
• Length of copy
• Frequency and timing of posts

For example, car manufacturers like Audi provide detailed instructions on how each post should look to maintain brand consistency.

Based on the audience’s needs

Once you’ve established which platforms you’re using, you’ll need to consider your audience’s needs.

This will depend heavily on the nature of your business and which platforms you’re using. However, certain points will be similar across all social media business accounts.

For example, an e-commerce social media style guide might include:

• How to reply to customer questions, concerns, or complaints
• Whether you are product- or company-focused, or a mixture of both
• How to manage leads generated from social media
• The best times for reaching potential customers
• Color schemes and designs based on the past social media activity of your customers

Take a look at the example above.

Retailer Urban Outfitters coordinate their social media strategy across the different platforms to ensure its tone of voice and imagery stay true to its brand.

Based on keywords

You may also include notes on keywords specific to your audience. Doing so will increase the possibility that potential customers will find your profiles.

Also, think carefully about any hashtags you want to use. These will further contribute to improving the visibility of your profiles.

For example, an electronic signature service might target the specific keyword ‘electronic signature Canada’.

Whatever your social media keywords, note them down with the reasoning.

Storing your guide

Finally, you’ll need to consider how and where to store your guide.

Most brands are increasingly digital, meaning many social media guides take the form of PDFs.

These are often saved in the cloud to make them easily accessible to current team members as well as future ones.

What Must Your Social Media Style Guide Include?

Your social media style guide will be unique to your company and its needs, but some of the key features it should cover include:

1. A List of Your Social Media Platforms

Include a list of all the social media platforms that your company uses or plans to use in the future. These will depend on your target audience.

For example, if your brand is aimed at younger consumers, you may focus on TikTok over Facebook. If you’re a B2B company, perhaps LinkedIn would be more suitable.

Each platform has different features and formats. Make sure your guidelines provide details on how your brand will be portrayed in each.

This could also include the names of your different accounts and any variations you might have for different countries.

For instance, the sports brand Nike has multiple Instagram accounts: Nike, Nike Running, Nike Sportswear, etc. Keeping a record of your different accounts will avoid confusion in the future.

2. Brand Language

There should be a section on the words and expressions to describe your brand.

Be specific, as this will help you refer consistently to your brand, product, and services across all platforms.

Take a look at the example from Destination Canada below.

They use their section on brand language to identify a preference for the “traveler” over the “tourist.” They also identify a focus on more optimistic vocabulary instead of a language with more negative connotations.

When writing your style guide, do some brainstorming to come up with the language that best suits your brand.

3. Hashtags

These will be the words and phrases you want to use as hashtags to help improve your brand’s visibility.

There will be more general ones you will regularly use and hashtags for specific campaigns you may be running.

Alongside the different hashtags, think carefully about how many you will use for each social media platform. For example, you might add three hashtags to posts on LinkedIn and eight to a post on Instagram.

Software company PandaDoc limits the number of hashtags they use across all their social media platforms.

Screenshot taken from linkedin.com

Screenshot taken from instagram.com

4. Color Palette

It’s essential to give details on the colors you want to use and how and when they should be used. Using the same color palette across all your social media platforms will go a long way to unifying your brand image.

Identify your primary colors and your secondary colors. Also, consider the color proportion and how to maintain the correct color balance. You’ll want your primary colors to feature more prominently than your secondary colors.

The Red Cross provides a great example of how to do this in their style guidelines. By sticking to their color choices, they are able to maintain a recognizable brand identity.

5. Formatting

Include details on how different posts will be formatted to ensure quality and consistency across different platforms.

Think about where your logo will be placed in posts and the size of the posts needed for different platforms. Outline the exact spacing, image sizing, and where your logo will be placed.

You could even take it a step further, as Audi does, and consider how your posts will appear on different mobile devices.

6. Tone and Voice

This section is where you’ll outline the tone of voice that best suits your brand.

Is it serious and formal or fun and quirky, for example?

Including clear guidelines for your company’s brand voice will help your content creators produce social media posts that read consistently and truly represent your brand.

You may also want to provide specifics of different tones of voice and when to use them, as Starbucks does in the example below.

7. Typography

In this section, you need to identify the fonts you plan on using across your posts.

These play a big part in making your brand recognizable. Include fonts for titles, headings, and body copy. Think also about the font’s weight and whether you will use italics.

If you use a font designed specifically for your brand, you may want to include a link or instructions on how to access it.

8. Emojis

These can be an expressive addition to your content but may not always be appropriate.

You may choose to avoid them when posting on LinkedIn to project a more professional image but use them quite liberally on Twitter.

If you choose to use them, outline which ones you plan to use, how many you will include, and where you’ll use them.

Headspace limits its use of emojis to the end of posts and only includes one or two not to overwhelm the viewer and distract from the content.

9. Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation

Another factor to include in your social media style guide are specific spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules you plan to use. This could cover when you hyphenate words, whether you want to avoid using the passive or comma use.

Something else to consider is the variant of English you use.

If you have accounts aimed at an American, British, or Australian audience, you could also include guidelines on how spelling and punctuation will vary.

Ben & Jerry’s brand guidelines for language

10. Multimedia

In this section, you need to outline the different types of images you plan to use.

Will you use stock images or only those produced specifically for your brand? Will you add a watermark?

You should also consider any filters you might add to images so as to keep your brand recognizable.

Moreover, you should also think about how your video content will be formatted and any music choices so these will be consistent across your social media platforms.

Social Media Style Guide Examples

Below are examples of three social media style guides and what makes them so successful.

1. Audi

Audi goes the extra mile to outline its guidelines for its social media.

They provide image sizes, profile pictures, and branding before providing specific branding for individual platforms.

By going into such detail, they can maintain brand consistency, making it recognizable no matter which social media platform they are viewed on.

2. Boy Scouts of America

Boy Scouts of America’s brand guidelines

The Boy Scouts of America use their style guide to encapsulate everything necessary to display their brand across all platforms. They cover typography, color, logos, layout, content, and imagery for their main brand and sub-brands.

They reinforce their guidelines with real-world examples to demonstrate how they should be portrayed.

3. Vodafone

Vodafone’s brand guidelines

Vodafone is another example of a company utilizing a style guide to ensure consistency across its social media platforms.

Like Audi, they give specific guidelines for different social media sites and examples of how things should look.

They also provide some do’s and don’ts when posting the Vodafone logo. This makes it even easier for the brand to be depicted the way it wants.

How a Social Media Style Guide Benefits Your Brand

It may seem like a lot of time and effort. Still, there are proven benefits to building a guide that dictates your public communications via social media.

1. Consistency

The major benefit of a style guide for a company’s social media is to build consistency.

Why?

Because consistency is always beneficial to social media brands, and effective branding is about building a singular public image.

However, this can be difficult, especially when multiple people are working on your brand’s social media.

To overcome this, a style guide ensures a consistent tone of voice while establishing brand authority.

2. Training

Training can be challenging, but it’s worth it. Investing time and resources in training will allow your team to work cohesively and maintain your brand image.

Consider a social media style guide as key training equipment for your team.

Keep your guide in an easily accessible area on your server or cloud service. Go through the guide with new team members as soon as they are onboarded, and update your style guide as needed.

You can expand your social media guidelines to include all external communications, for example, creating a standardized email signature across your team’s email accounts.

3. Forward planning

Social media can drive sales and brand awareness. That said, sometimes your team simply won’t have the time to dedicate to social media activity.

By laying out social media brand guidelines, anyone in your team can plan content ahead of time or take over social media activity when the assigned person cannot.

Social media scheduling can also help to free up time to work on seasonal or promotional content.

For example, if you know that you post for a particular campaign two days per week and other campaigns three times, then you can lay this out in your guidelines and plan.

At quieter times, you can create a few weeks’ worths of content and use a scheduling tool to post automatically. This saves your team time and allows you to dedicate your efforts to labor-intensive social media campaigns instead.

SocialPilot has a scheduling feature that helps you plan your content in advance.

Their social media calendar allows you to plan more efficiently and get a clearer view of how things look with their ‘monthly plan view’. You can even reschedule posts and filter by account.

4. Collaboration

Some brands make external collaborations a crucial part of their brand strategy.

This might include collaborating with influencers, ambassadors, brands, or charity organizations. Collaborative posts are a great creative outlet and open up new business opportunities.

Your style guide will allow you to easily show collaborators what guidelines to adhere to and determine whether a collaboration between two parties would be mutually beneficial.

Furthermore, you can then compare style guides if you both have one. Finding similarities will help you identify hidden commonalities, which can further benefit your collaboration.

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Above is an example of SocialPilot’s guidelines for guest post collaboration. They provide detailed and clear guidelines to ensure the posts they receive are at the required standard.

5. Brand identity

Everything we’ve covered so far points towards this: social media style guides help to build brand identity.

Every team member’s ability to create consistent posts and act as one voice is key to building your brand identity and creating the social media persona you want.

A strong brand identity helps build authority and ensure your brand comes across as trustworthy and reliable. This, in turn, helps to build your customer base, drive sales and maintain customer retention.

Make Your Social Media Style Guide Work for You

Social media is a saturated market, meaning your brand needs to stand out.

Whatever your goals, whether raising brand awareness or increasing social media sales conversions, you should post thoughtful, well-reasoned content that resonates with your audience.

A carefully curated social media style guide can help you achieve high-quality social media campaigns. Making your content work for your audience is one of the best ways to make your social media work for you.

Asset insights help you learn more about the creative assets that resonate with your potential customers. This is an easy way to identify highly-engaged audiences, and can be used to inform the assets and landing pages you create for these groups, or even shift your entire marketing and product strategy. Using our previous sporting goods retailer example, you might see that bicycle-related image and video creative resonates with “Green Living Enthusiasts.” Based on this insight, you can pair these assets with a landing page that prominently features your sustainability efforts, or go one step further and use the insight to build out a completely new product line.

Audience insights, recently released at the account level, help you understand the characteristics of the people who engaged with your business. These insights give you a better idea of what your customers care about, making it easier to tune your creative for their unique interests and traits.

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What makes a good brand? Is it down to your messaging or design? Is it how you engage with your communities? Or is it down to how well you know your audience and can adjust? The secret to branding really might lie in the fact that it is all of these together. All of these rolled into one strategy for brand excellence. 

So, how do you go about designing a brand identity? How do you make sure that you have a strong brand identity in your company and really appeal to and engage with customers? We thought we would take a look at some of the most useful tips and advice to create strong branding for your audience. 

Speak to the Right Audience

The first thing is learning who your audience is and what they want. In many cases, B2B and B2C audiences will differ vastly. You will be finding them in different ways, they will want different messaging and you will need to engage with them differently. B2B is a somewhat unique animal compared to B2C marketing. You will be using different platforms and tools to engage with and reach these two different audiences. 

LinkedIn, for example, is a good example of a platform that is specifically made for B2B relationships. It allows you to search for, find and engage with the right customer base for your business. It provides you with key marketing data that you can utilize to reach and engage with your audiences. It also provides you with a way of actually reaching out to these leads and converting them to loyal, paying customers.

Spend Time Molding Your Brand 

When you know who your customer is and what they want, you need to spend time creating your brand around that. Remember, it is going to take some time and a lot of experimentation to get all of the elements just right. But start with the basics – your logo, your colors, your key messaging and your brand identity. 

Your brand name, for example, is something that you need to spend some time on. You will need to tell your customer what your company is about in the name. You will need to make it simple and easy to remember, but catchy and unique. There is plenty of literature on how to come up with a brand name, so spend some time doing some research on the brand name and test it with your audience. 

The same can be said for the rest of your brand identity. You will need imagery, key messaging and a website that reflects who you are and your basic values for your customers. Again, try something simple and to the point and play around with it until you find something that really works. 

Focus on Your Content Marketing  

Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with your content marketing? What is your customer going to get out of your marketing? Simply jumping in blindly to marketing can be a big mistake for your company. Spend some time putting together a strategy as well as a content calendar to flesh out what needs to be achieved and what you need to focus on.

One of our key pieces of advice for content marketing is to focus on the three E’s of content: educate, entertain and empower. Your content should be teaching your customer something about your brand, your products, your services and what it can do for them. 

Your blog section should be populated regularly. And this content should be highly educational and informative. Your customer should be walking away with key content that really educates them on the topic at hand. You will want to establish yourself as a dominant authority figure in the industry. So, focus on content that they can learn something from, and use that as a basis for your marketing. 

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Try, Test and Measure Everything 

We have mentioned several times that in order to get your brand just right, you will want to try, test and experiment with everything. When you are launching your logo or your brand name, test it out with your audience first. Get some feedback on your branding. Try A/B testing everything. Give them two different options and see what receives the more positive feedback. 

The same goes for all elements of your website, from CTAs to content, banners, images and your sales funnel. There are tons of platforms and tools that you can use to monitor how well things are being picked up in your brand. You are able to monitor how much traffic comes to your site and how it behaves with Google Analytics. With this, you will be able to see what marketing works and what pages are the highest sources of bounces. 

Another really helpful tool is HotJar. This allows you to see how far your customer goes down your page, what they click on, what they open, where they are more attracted to. With this, you will be able to A/B test some of the key branding on your site. 

The Bottom Line

Don’t be afraid to test things out with your branding. Your customer is constantly evolving and changing. Your company is constantly evolving too. So, keep trying new things and make sure you are keeping up with the latest trends and industry changes.

If you’re a marketer, it’s likely been a very – odd – Q4!