Highlights of social media best practice

April 22, 2024|Accountants, Kim's Blog, Lawyers, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy|

I was delighted to be able to join Chloe Christine of Legal Marketing UK – TBD Marketing Agency for Lawyers at her first presentation of the PM Forum’s digital marketing course “Social Media Best Practice”. It was a full house with assistant, executive and manager delegates from legal, accountancy, actuarial and consultancy firms. Some were in general marketing and business development roles – others were focused on digital marketing. Highlights of social media best practice – with Chloe Christine for PM Forum.

Chloe started by exploring the role of social media for both corporate and personal social media accounts – and its role in corporate and personal brand building. She noted that personal pages always outperform company pages.

Use meaningful metrics – Tailor KPIs

We discussed the dangers of vanity metrics. Common corporate social media metrics included:

Brand awareness (e.g reach, impressions, share of voice)
Engagement (impressions, likes, comments, shares, response time, blog performance, connections, followers)
Lead generation (e.g. click thru rate – CTR, conversion rate, lead quality)

Delegates raised their common challenges with social media metrics:

Integrating with GA4 analytics
Attribution modelling
User journey complexity
Data silos
Real time data interpretation
Resources for monitoring and reporting
Communicating metrics to stakeholders

Set realistic social media objectives

This led to a discussion about setting realistic social media objectives – against which meaningful metrics could be measured.

Chloe suggested:

Identify business goals
Translate business goals into social media actions
Set SMART social media goals
Integrate with overall marketing strategy

She also commented on the need to co-ordinate social media metrics with other marketing and business development activities such as webinar registrations and speaking event attendances for overall campaign coherence. She also provided many examples of possible corporate and personal social media branding goals.

Build a social media strategy

A poll revealed asked whether delegates felt confident about their social media strategy for the next six months and longer term. 19% responded “Yes”, 63% answered “Somewhat” and 19% replied “No”.

Strategy needed to include: Goal setting, audience identification, content planning (calendar) and creation, engagement tactics, monitoring and analytics, resource allocation (tools, team roles and budget)

For analysis, Chloe talked about LinkedIn Analytics, Google Ads analytics and GA4 for web sites. Tools for planning content included:

She also suggested Juphy: 24/7 AI Sales Assistant for Shopify Stores for a unified social media inbox to make responding easier.

There was a discussion about matching different content types to social media goals e.g.:

Brand awareness – infographics and videos, thought leadership, white papers, case studies
Increase engagement – polls and questions
Increase community interaction – live Q&A and webinars
Drive web site traffic – blog posts

And we considering different social media platforms:

LinkedIn was seen as best for B2B markets
Twitter/X for real time communications and news sharing. Good for barristers
Facebook offered broad reach, community building and targeted ads
Instagram for visual storytelling and younger demographics
TikTok reaching younger audiences with creative, short form video content

Brand on social media

Messaging and visual appearance needs to consistent across all channels for recognition, trust, coherence, impact and emotional connection. Canva: Visual Suite for Everyone was suggested for pre-prepared posts. Although slight modifications were needed to adapt to different platforms.

Chloe suggested that we conduct a Social Media Audit for brand consistency. Things to check included: profile completeness, consistency of branding, marketing objectives, engagement, activity, compliance and professionalism. She also provided delegates with template audits for both corporate and personal accounts which included the elements to consider:

Visual elements (logos, colours, fonts, logo placement, typography)
Tone of voice (personality and messaging and language)
Content style (imagery and video)
Engagement approach

She mentioned the synergy between personal and corporate branding – both boost recognition, enhance employee advocacy, amplify posts, generate reciprocal benefits, share content and visibility and promote mutual growth.

She suggested the use of tagging, adopting similar headshots and banners, maintaining distinct voices, balancing personal and corporate branding, complementary strategies, considering cross-promotion strategies and adhering to ethical considerations. She advised marketers to sell the benefits to people to update their profiles – and suggested gamification (competition of most likes, comments etc and create a leaderboard with incentives).

Establish social media analytics

We went on to explored on-platform vs off-platform social media analytics. A poll revealed:

Poll on site – 40% “Very comfortable”, 60% “Somewhat”
On web site – 7% “Very comfortable, 93% “Not comfortable”

Chloe talked about UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters which are strings of text added to URLs to track and identify where people come from to the web site. And she provided a UTM link builder creation spreadsheet – and walked us through an example. And explored the reports section of GA4 to assist with campaign measurement. Suggested tools included:

Reporting Ninja | Multichannel reporting made easy (around $20 pcm)
Looker Studio (google.com) Especially for data visualisation

Create a content calendar

A content calendar supports: consistency, content quality, aligned marketing goals and facilitates team collaboration. A poll revealed that delegates used:

Hootsuite 50%
Buffer 10%
Sprout social 10%
HubSpot 0%
Other 30% (Loomly, Canva)

Manage content creation and curation

Recent research by Richard van der Blom Algorithm Insights 2024 – 5th Edition V.1.1 (gumroad.com) indicated a drop of 40-50% in reach for 95% content creators. Key points included:

Past content strategies now less effective
Infographic have increased reach
PDF carousels (especially those with 12-15 slides) were hitting engagement sweet spots
Text and image posts remain effective with optimal length between 900-1,200 characters ( emphasis on readability)
DMs and newsletters can maintain visibility as reach declines
Aim for quality over quantity
Minimise external links
Focus on growing followers not just connections – followers send a strong signal of content

She reminded delegates that social media is a platform for engagement, not direct sales.

Chloe answered delegate questions throughout the session. Topics included:

Views on the use of X/Twitter? (consider your analytics and conduct a cost/benefit analysis)
Cost of LinkedIn Live Overview | LinkedIn Help (for live broadcasts)
The Social Media Maturity Model – created by Simon at TBD Marketing. There is an alternative: Social Media Maturity Model: What You Need to Know | Sprinklr