First impressions (brainstorming at your first Tailgunner Social Media Meeting)

Be it a casual phone call or a catch-up over coffee, your first meeting with the Tailgunner team is essential to establishing a strong social media presence, particularly in your first month. Your first few posts are pretty important. There’s a lot we can learn from how the posts are received, and how simple they are to prepare and maintain. Before we get caught up on details, we’ll need to get a feel for your brand. 

Here are a few topics we’d like to cover with you at your first meeting with our team:

  • Tell us about your business or brand – your history, values, team and aspirations. 
  • Tell us about your customers – we’ll need an understanding of the audience we’ll be working to reach, to entertain and to impress. 
  • Do you have any social media accounts that you admire? Share them with us so we can get a feel for your ideal account structure. 

 

Don’t start without visuals!

One of the biggest mistakes we see so many businesses make is starting an account without any visual representation for their brand. When it comes to social media, posting content without a complimentary piece of visual stimuli is simply not going to succeed. Everything is visual these days. Got something to say? Got a fact or statistic to share? Got a new product you need to peddle? Say it with an image. 

For companies looking to set up social accounts for products, we recommend the following: 

  • Hire a professional photographer to take as many photos of your products as possible (we’re talking hundreds of photos – thousands if you can!)
  • If you can’t afford a professional, there are plenty of young professionals and students looking to broaden their portfolios, and you might be able to come to an affordable arrangement – talk to the Tailgunner team about this one, because we should be able to help you make the right connections. 
  • If you can’t compile your own photos, make sure you set up a photo folder with the Tailgunner team of approved stock photography or user-generated content that we can share for your first month (not a long-term solution, but this can get you off the ground while you prepare your professional pics)

For companies looking to set up accounts for services, we recommend the following: 

  • Give the Tailgunner team a wishlist for stock photography that you would like our team to use – be sure to let us know about any aspects you’d like us to promote (such as diversity of people in the photos) or avoid (such as pictures of tradesmen not using proper safety gear)
  • If your service can’t be photographed, let’s work together on some graphic templates that we can use to visually inspire your audience while discussing the benefits and details of your service. 
  • Share photos of your team, office, clients and other such personal scenarios that will show your company’s more human and relatable qualities to your audience. If you have a cat that likes to hang around the office, for example, sharing about this on social media will give your followers something warm and memorable to associate with you and your team. 

When it comes to starting up a new social media account, it really does pay to guide your social media management team in terms of imagery and photography. Any time you invest in this sort of organisation will pay off in the long run. If we have to wait for photos to share, your audience misses out on seeing your products in their best light, and subsequently loses interest. 

Don’t let anyone lose interest – secure their attention by starting off on the right foot…visually. 

 

Establish your ‘look’ – colours, fonts

To elaborate on some of what we discussed in the above points, it really pays to establish your ‘look’ before we start scheduling content for your brand. A consistent collection of colours, fonts and themes will give your brand a sharper, more polished and reliable appearance. 

With our graphic design team, take a moment to discuss and agree upon a few of the following visual features: 

  • Two fonts that represent your brand (one for fun titles, the other for big bodies of text) 
  • Your logo file (send us a high-quality version of your logo file for important announcement posts such as competitions or sales) 
  • At least two colours that represent your brand (we can always take these from your logo file 

 

Discover your voice (tone)

Your social media tone leaves a lasting impression on your audience. Think of your tone as your company’s personality. Are you lighthearted and comedic, or professional and detail-driven? Should your audience be entertained, informed, or both? 

Help the Tailgunner team establish a tone for your brand by working with us to create a character profile for your brand. This way, when it comes to creating competitions, promotions or announcements, we’ll know how to word them in a confident, consistent voice that compliments the rest of your usual posts. 

 

Time to experiment 

For the first month of social media posting, we like to experiment a bit with post times. We’ll try some posting in the morning and some in the afternoon. Try not to be alarmed when you see this sporadic scheduling style – we’re simply experimenting to see when your audience is online, and at what time they are most likely to interact. We’ll also earn a month of data to analyse and review, so let us ensure we’re getting the most useful data that we possibly can.  

 

Get to know your audience 

In the first month of scheduling, we’ll pay close attention to the messages and comments that our new posts will be getting on your profile. We’ll see what sort of questions your audience are asking, what makes them laugh and what makes them curious. We’ll also see what posts encourage people to make contact, or to click onto your website. 

There’s lots to learn, but each interaction (no matter how negative) helps us further understand your audience so that we can ensure to provide the perfect content for them in the future. 

 

Develop consistent content streams 

While we would prefer to agree on a reliable schedule of content streams before the first month of your content is released, we understand that this isn’t always doable. Sometimes there’s a need for experimentation first. During our first month of scheduling, we can try either of the following: 

  • Post three times a week, with a similar stream of content being shared on specific days of the week (for example, your restaurant might post about takeaway food on Monday, Date Night on Wednesday and After Work Drinks on Fridays) 
  • Experiment with several types of posts for the first few weeks, then model future posts after whichever styles were successful (your audience might only respond to funny, shareable content, so we can keep things lighthearted going forward, for example)

It pays to revisit and revise your content stream structure regularly. We’ll go more in-depth on this in our next point…

 

Stay tuned for the second part of this blog in April 2020!