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Social media has been one of the best places to showcase your business, especially for IT companies. With over 80% of consumers using social media to help them make purchasing decisions about IT goods and services, it’s not a platform that you should ignore.
But getting content right on social media is far from the easiest thing for any marketer – and even more so for IT companies, which already have a hurdle of issues related to content to overcome before posting anything. But with a little adjustment to your content strategy, your IT business can help turn social media into a powerful marketing tool.
First, it may be useful to look at tech companies that have some strong presence on social media to start with or tech brands that have hit some success with their social media marketing:
Don’t be intimidated that all of these are big brands: at their heart, what made their campaigns work can work for any company, regardless of its size. These campaigns succeeded because they used social media to present a human face to the brands – personalizing how people see them, instead of remaining brand names on a screen.
But how exactly do you go about this? Here are the specific challenges that IT companies usually need to overcome when writing content (and not just the ones for social media):
IT and technology in general are always innovating: improving themselves, adding more features, and generally changing the landscape where they operate. This is all well and good – except for one problem. Increasingly, people can’t keep up with or understand the rate of these changes anymore.
So when you write content, you have to keep in mind that there may be a significant portion of your intended audience that doesn’t understand or care about any advancements you’ve made. This is not them being deliberately ignorant, but it does put the importance of making sure what you have to say is something that they’ll care about.
Simply making relevant content may not always be enough either. Even if your content could be potentially seen by all 4 billion people on social media, you need to make sure that your content sticks in their memory. In short, you need to make an impression.
There are plenty of ways to do this, but one of the best ones by far (as you’ll see with the companies above) is to treat your social media as a person representing your brand, not the brand itself. Again, the point is to give your IT content a human lens for your customers to see through – something that social media platforms themselves already actively encourage doing.
On average, people spend a little over 2 hours on social media every day. While that may sound like a long time, keep in mind that your content will be competing for all the content that they’re already on the platform to see. What you publish should make sense in their feeds filled with posts from friends, family, and other people in their life – if you’re too out of place, your content will be ignored.
That means not making social media content too long for them to not bother reading through all of it, but not short enough that it gets lost in the posts on their feed. Sometimes, all you may need is a few seconds to a minute of engagement to pique their interest, and your landing page or outbound links will do the rest.
Knowing the challenges (and companies that have succeeded in overcoming them), how can IT companies reliably write content for their social media? While the specifics will differ depending on what niche you operate in – B2B, SaaS, IoT, or MSPs – there are general rules that you should always follow for posting on social media.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make on social media is posting a large wall of text on people’s timelines. They’re not going to read it, the copy won’t go well, and it’s highly unlikely that it’ll gain a lot of traction.
The strength of social media is in its ability to include (and sometimes revolve) around visual content: pictures, videos, infographics, quizzes, and other related posts. It’s easy to think that social media content is mostly about social media copy – but with a little tweaking, even your content can be presented in a visually memorable way.
Publicity is a mixed bag that every business will have to deal with once they start using social media for their marketing. This is an area that’s crucial for IT companies to get right since anything your customers say about you – good or bad – will most likely appear in real time.
So if you’re going to go on social media, make sure that you allocate the time and resources to creating content that answers your customer feedback. Don’t just reply to comments: highlight reviews, address complaints, and give regular updates based on what your audience is telling you. It’ll help increase your engagement rates, and will make people more likely to trust your brand.
Social media is often the birthplace of many memes, trends, and cultural shifts: and as someone on these platforms, your company will undoubtedly be exposed to a lot of these. Don’t fall into the trap of going with the most popular trend at the moment: deliberate and decide whether or not it’s something that can work for your brand.
Picking and choosing the right trends to hop on will not only increase your engagement, but it’ll make more positive impressions overall. Always make sure to frame your social media posting appropriately to your space in IT – just crashing in your audience’s feeds on a trend that doesn’t suit you is likely to cause more harm than good.
While social media can certainly be the most visible part of your IT brand, don’t forget that it’s largely a means to an end. Remember to do something with all the engagement you get – whether it’s an outbound link to a landing page, a call-to-action for your services, or even just getting them to follow you actively from then on.
Getting carried away with social media posting while ignoring the business side of your brand is often the start of the downfall of many IT brands, because your audience may think you’re sacrificing quality for visibility. Make sure that your business keeps up with what you can offer on social media, and never post something on social media you’re not 100% sure you can deliver on.
Impressions, likes, and views aren’t just numbers on the board – most of the time, they’re good indicators of how successful your social media campaigns are. You can inflate these numbers with direct advertising (and this tactic can work sometimes) but the best numbers will be the ones that you pull in through organic marketing.
The great thing about using social media is that you can confirm these numbers without the need to dive into fancy tools since many social media platforms already offer an overview of your audience engagement. Keeping documentation about this over time can help you figure out how successful your social media campaigns are, and can play further into your overall content strategy.
If you want your audience to avoid glassy eyes when reading about IT services, try engaging them with social media. Shareable content is relevant content – and in the increasingly competitive IT scene, that can often be the key to staying ahead of the competition.
