Posted by Pragmatic Design on 25 June 2012 | 1 Comments

Tags: Social Media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, OpenGraph, Marketing, SME

 1. Time your Tweets 

Some times of day are better to Tweet than others. The best time varies depending on your market, but retailers might find it better to post in the evening when their potential clients are online at home, whereas business to business services would find it beneficial to Tweet during office hours.

Also, Tweeting too often can brand you as a nuisance, but too infrequently can leave your message lost.

Use a service that will allow you to build up a list of Tweets and most them at specific times or intervals. This can also allow you to better manage your time- write your Tweets in one go, rather than breaking off from your other activities several times a day.

Useful link: Buffer App

 2. Link your Accounts

Type once, post to many. Configure your Twitter account so that your posts are automatically posted to your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts too.

There are facilities available that allow your Facebook or LinkedIn updates to be automatically Tweeted, but it's then very easy to exceed Twitter's 140 character limit.

Useful links: Twitter's Facebook Application, LinkedIn's Learning Center (Twitter)

 3. Change Facebook's Link Summary

When posting a link on Facebook, your web page is scanned and sample text and images are extracted to serve as a "link summary". Although useful for highlighting the content, it often fails to provide a compelling call to action for readers to click and visit your website.

Fortunately, you can edit the text which Facebook chooses and toggle between images. Before pressing the “Share” button, click on the text you wish to edit and type a better summary.

Useful link: Facebook Help Center

 4. Overriding Facebook's Link Summary

We've already mentioned how you can customise the summary Facebook pulls from your link, but what about when others link to your website? Fortunately, your webpage can be edited to specifically tell Facebook what the description and image should be.

The person posting the link can still edit the summary, but they're much less likely to do so if you've already provided a good quality, relevant and appealing summary.

Give us a call if you need help implementing this on your website.

Useful link: Facebook Developer Tools

 5. Social Media Keywords

Just like a web search engine, social media posts and profiles can be searched, so ensure that you include relevant keywords.

Of course, just as with your website, be careful not to overload with keywords- once you've enticed the search engine to show you, you'll still need to entice the searcher to engage with you.