Social media can help to grow your business, generate leads and help you build your brand. There are lots of social media platforms available, but that doesn’t mean you have to use all of them…

1. Choose appropriate social media platforms for your business e.g. broadly speaking, LinkedIn and Twitter are useful for B2B and Facebook is great for B2C businesses
2. Create a plan to structure your posts/tweets
3. Deliver consistent content
4. Create posts that engage with target audience by educating, entertaining and inspiring. Make posts worth sharing
5. Use keywords in your posts that your audience may search for on social media
6. Analyse past content to improve posts (free on twitter and Facebook)
7. Optimise visual content – visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared than any other type of content
8. Follow others that are important to your industry
9. Share content relevant to your industry
10. Share updates about your business e.g anniversaries, awards or a new employee
11. Link your social media accounts
12. Use #tags, just don’t overuse them
13. Drive traffic to your website by posting about it
14. Republish old content – there’s no harm in posting about what you’ve done in the past
15. Schedule posts for out of hours – TweetDeck is really simple to use. Hootsuite is also a useful tool to plan and schedule posts
16. Test different times of the day to see when is most effective for engaging with your audience
17. Use Google Analytics to see if your posts are increasing traffic on your website
18. Interact with influencers on LinkedIn
19. Explore paid advertising
20. Look at what your competitors are doing – and do it better!