So you have a Facebook page and Twitter profile, now what? What do you post?

• When trying to think about what content to post to your social pages, first think about your audience. Who are they? What do they care about? What’s important to them? What would be helpful to them? Try and avoid thinking about what you want to say to help sell mortgages, but instead think more about giving valuable information to your networks to build relationships and trust.
• Why not ask your fans on Facebook what they are interested in or want to talk about? Use Survey Monkey, a free survey tool, to find out. You can easily connect your survey to your Facebook page, and engage with them in a new way.

10 % Rule

• 9 out of every 10 posts you write for a social media site should be information or conversation that is purely interesting to your audience, not necessarily a direct sales pitch of your products or services. 1 in 10 may be about your bank and why an individual or business would choose to bank with you.

Variety!

•  Try to give your friends and fans a variety of posts: video, photos, article links, text, etc.

Inspire Action

• Stimulate conversation. Social media platforms are not meant for you to just speak out to the world but are meant to support two-way communication.  Ask questions. Talk about topics that would be the main conversation if you went to a dinner party tonight.
• Don’t be afraid to end a post with “like this post if….” This encourages people to interact with your content in a way that also drives your post to the top of people’s newsfeeds (Facebook) helping you expand your reach beyond just your fans.

Community Before Commerce

• This is the list of priorities. First, focus on building your community by creating great content. Once the community is strong and the trust is built, then you can begin introducing commerce and providing solutions for your community’s needs. It’s a process that requires patience but will pay off in the end.

Not Enough Time?

• You may be thinking, I don’t have enough time to post and engage daily like I should on our social pages.  Try signing up with Hootsuite – it’s free. Hootsuite will allow you to post to multiple social pages at the same time. Other cool features: schedule your posts in advance (very handy before a vacation) and create a free click report to see how many people are engaging with your content. The report feature will help you learn from the past and tweak future content choices to reflect what your audience truly cares about. (This isn’t a FULL picture since it only measures click through on links you have included in your posts). And, you can do all of this from your smart phone!