Welcome to the Jungle: What Do Your Social Posts Say About Your Brand?

As the landscape of social networking sites continues to evolve, keeping up with the latest trends can feel like navigating a jungle. But, that doesn’t mean social is for the birds. Your social posts and how you use your social pages says a lot about your business, and these can make or break your brand’s image in the eyes of your customers.

While you embark on your social adventures, you’re bound to see a lot of different styles of page management. Each one reflects differently on the businesses that run them. Meet a few of the most common social animals below and learn how to improve your posting habits before you ruin your brand image — or worse, your online presence goes extinct.

The Lion

We get it: you’re extremely proud of yourself. Lions have a tendency to spend all of their time posting about themselves and their business. Buy this. Click here. I got this award. I’m having a sale. It’s nice to know you’re doing well and that you’re passionate about your business, but roaring so loud is going to send your audience running for their lives.

 

Tame the Beast: It’s time to work on your content marketing skills. Consumers know when they are being sold to and will begin to tune you out if you don’t learn to post less about yourself. Your customers want to see content that is helpful, interesting and relevant to their lives, not continuous self-promotion.

The Parrot

These social animals may look impressive at first, but squawk as they might, there’s no real substance to their updates. Parrots are copycats who post and share content that others create, and while the posts may be entertaining, there’s nothing original about them. Your audience is going to catch on and see that everything you share is coming from other sources, and pretty soon, they’ll move on to someone more authentic.

Learn Some New Tricks: Create your own content! From snappy social copy to powerful visuals, attract your audience with unique updates and posts. Your audience wants to see that you put effort into your social presence. If you want to go a step further, write original long-form content that you can publish on blogs or LinkedIn that may help you become a thought leader in your industry.

The Tortoise

Not everyone can be an expert on social media, but having a presence is vital to engaging with your audiences online. Tortoises, however, don’t seem to believe that. Tortoises are rarely seen if not completely invisible, choosing to hide out in their shells rather than embrace the world around them. These social users post too infrequently to attract their customers’ attention and likely cast their social pages into complete solitude.

Come Out of Your Shell: There’s no need to be so shy! Simply begin to post more frequently, letting your customers know that yes, you do exist, and you want to engage with them. If you’re not certain you’ll be able to maintain a regular posting schedule, sit down and make yourself a calendar of subjects to post about, making future posts easier to complete. Or, you can always ask us for a little help.

The Monkey

Monkeys need to tone it down a bit. Monkeys are playful with their social pages, sharing funny videos of “hilarious fails” and “cats that want to haz cheezburger,” but is that really what you want your customers to see? You may be posting regularly, and you may think your page is entertaining, but your silly posting habits make you look juvenile and unreliable. At the end of the day, will a customer go to someone who showed them last month’s viral video, or to someone who looks like an expert?

Quit Monkeying Around: It’s time for you to evolve your page a little bit. Make yourself look more professional by removing overly silly posts and start catering your content to things that are a little more business oriented. Don’t get me wrong, being playful is a great way to boost engagement, but there are better ways to do it. Show off fun events you attend, post pictures of cool things in or around your business, maybe even humanize your page with images of you and/or your colleagues, but please…leave the LOLcats on Imgur.

The Owl

The wise owls of social media might be experts in their respective industries, but their posts are out of their audience’s reach. Owls are extremely bright and enjoy sharing numbers-heavy, stat-driven articles, and studies on their pages. They scatter their posts with jargon that’s hard to understand and there is nothing conversational about their tone. While this information may be helpful to some, the majority of people browsing online want content that is engaging, not dry.

Come Down from Your High Branches: Know your audience and make sure you’re sharing content that they can relate to. If you’re targeting certified geniuses, then maybe the reports and studies you share are perfect, but odds are that isn’t the only audience you’re serving, and no one wants to bust out a dictionary to understand your headlines. Find a healthy balance of educational and engaging.

The Shark

Sharks are a special group of users who prey on other social pages as a means to grow their own. They lie in wait, swimming under the radar through the vast sea of sites, only to appear and self-promote when they feel the time is right. When another business page posts something that is highly engaged or has a large reach, sharks like to comment or reply with links that direct other users back to their own page. They feed off of others and do so with ferocious enthusiasm.

Fish are Friends, Not Food: Focus more on what you can do with your own page. Relying on aggressive self-promotion tactics through other business pages can make you look desperate and out of place. Instead, focus on the fans you already have, and try to provide content that they end up sharing on their own pages. Building a faithful following of customers will only increase you positive appearance and could lead to a lot more referral business.

Social media might feel like a jungle at times, but there’s no need to get lost in the weeds. Now that you have a better understanding of what your content says about you and your business, you can learn to tame your posts and conquer your beastly habits.