Social Media Best Practice Tips from a PR Agency

I have been working at a start-up called Glamsquad, an in-home beauty service providing hair styling, make-up and other beauty services.  As a company incepted earlier this year, one of the biggest initiatives was to create awareness.  However, without full operations and complete branding in place, we wanted to limit our publicity and only wanted some initial seeding and so they helped with some blogger outreach, but also received some advice on the social media.

The social media platforms we primarily used were Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.  

Facebook Tips: 
- posting on FB once a day
- the look, feel, aesthetic should be consistent with the branding (have branding guidelines with text, color scheme, and logo)
- our company logo should be on every piece of original content
- community management is important to humanize the brand, so take the time to reply to comments
- showing behind the scenes shots so fans feel they know the brand on a more intimate level

Twitter Tips:
- don't just talk to people who tweet your brand, but search for other relevant hashtags and engage in conversation to build a fan base
- retweet happy customers serves as a way to share positive testimonials
- trending hashtags are a great entry point for conversation (for example, if the Grammy's are trending, can say something like: "Having a #grammys party? Invite @glamsquad over to be part of your girl's night")
- tweets should be a mix of conversational tweets to benefit the fans, but also tweets about the company and announcements
- authenticity increases believability - the more you appear to be somebody your demographic identifies with, the more people will want to talk to you

Instagram Tips:
- update 2-3 times a week
- again, show behind the scenes shots
- use Instagram videos to make it more interactive and a great way to switch up content
- original content is best, but can cross pollinate content 
- since sharing is not a built-in aspect of instagram, images should not be branded. instagram is a platform where images should appear natural and in the moment

I think a big takeaway is really that through social media, you are promoting the brand through conversation and interaction with fans - it shouldn't be a way to be too pushy with the product.  Even in e-mail marketing, many of our initial e-mails were promotional in nature, giving out discounts, but I think this may signal some desperation if done too often.  The best e-mails I think are in more of a blog format, where we aren't trying to sell a product, but instead sharing insights and advice that may be of interest to our customers.