Blog

Whether your company is open or closed, it’s still important to communicate with your customers, employees and vendors. But before you do that, you should be asking yourself:

What does your audience really need to know about your organization right now? There is too much information coming out every day; it’s overwhelming and people are unable to process it all.

When you communicate, be clear, concise, calm, and compassionate. If you have a lot of info to share, bullet it out to make it easy for people to get the key points. Tell them only what they need to know; don’t overcommunicate.

If you typically send an eblast to your audience every month or more frequently,  think twice before you send your next blast. Is what you are saying relevant to what is happening right now? If not, don’t send it.

Consider putting up a message on your website giving people information about your business operations during the pandemic.

And don’t forget, picking up the phone can be very effective for staying connected – or even re-connecting – with customers, vendors and people in your network.

Let’s talk about social media for a few minutes.

• The average US adult spends 38 minutes per day on Facebook. Facebook is still by far the most widely used platform. So, you should be thinking about having a business page on Facebook.
• Facebook has 1.4 billion active users on a daily basis.
• LinkedIn has more than 660 members worldwide and 303 million active monthly users. Again, think about having a company LinkedIn page.
• 16-24-year-olds spend a median of 3 hours a day on social media.
• Internet users spend an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networking in 2019.
• The average daily time spent on social in 2018 was 142 minutes a day.
• By 2021, more than 3 billion people are expected to be on social media.
• Projections for social media use estimates the average adult will spend 6 years and 8 months of their life on social media.

My point is that social media should be an important tool in your communications and marketing toolbox. It supports your online visibility in searches. If you’ve invested in audience building in the past, now you can leverage those efforts. But if you haven’t, it’s not too late to work on building your audience.

Please remember that not all of your followers are going to see your organic social media posts when they scroll their daily feed. For LinkedIn, it’s 20% and for Facebook it’s 3% to 10%. And of those followers who are seeing your post, not all of them are going to stop and read it. So, posting consistency and frequency is very important.

Generally speaking, this is how often your business should post on social media:

• Facebook: 1 time per day or 5 times per week.
• Twitter: 3-5 times per day.
• LinkedIn: 1 time per day.
• Instagram 1 to 3 times a day.

And remember, not all posts should be marketing-related. It’s called social media for a reason – be social, share something humorous if it fits your brand, share a memory, share something uplifting, share something useful. If you’re closed, maybe you want to tell people what improvements you’re making to your business during the closure … maybe you’re painting or doing a deep clean of your office.