I am the poster child of the Millennial generation. Currently, I am between the ages of 14 and 34 years old. I have never known a world without computers.
I consider myself to be pretty savvy when it comes to social media. I have profiles on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Checking my profiles is part of my daily routine and I take my smartphone with me wherever I go.
When I was awarded an internship with Socialmediaonlineclasses.com, I was unsure of what to expect.
Social media? Yeah I can do that, I thought, I do that every day.
What I didn’t know was that social media for business is extremely different than social media for personal use. While the broad concepts are somewhat similar, there are several differences that I never would have thought about.
Here are three major ones:
Hashtags
Personal Use
Hashtags are meant to designate the topic of your post. Often, I see people using them incorrectly on their personal profiles. Sometimes they include hashtags that have nothing to do with what they’re talking about, and sometimes they don’t use them at all.
Even though I consider myself very proficient with social media, I never understood the point of using hashtags (and I certainly didn’t use them correctly) until I started my internship with SMOC.
Professional Use
Though they have little importance to people who use social media for personal reasons, hashtags are essential for small businesses on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. They can help people find your business easily, and they expand the reach of your posts.
The Bottom Line
No matter which social network you use, hashtags are important. They are a key component of social media marketing, and it’s important to learn how to use them properly:
Images
Personal Use
Everyone loves looking at your photos on social media! They make you smile, they capture moments in time and they can be more vivid and long-lasting than memories. Typically, people share photos of their vacations, the food they eat and anything else they find interesting.
If you have a personal social media profile, you’ve probably uploaded at least a few pictures to share with friends and family. Photographs are interesting to look at, and sometimes simply writing a post about something doesn’t do it justice.
Professional Use
Posts with images can be a fun way to show your friends what you’re up to, but when it comes to marketing your business, photos serve a very different purpose.
Instead of showing what you’re up to and who you’re with, it’s better to show pictures of your products and any ads or promotions you have going on at the time.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to social media marketing strategy, there’s much more to images than you think.
While the image uploading process is the same for both professional and personal use, it’s probably the only thing that’s the same. For a personal profile, you can pretty much upload any images you want.
For a business, that’s not the case. It’s important to learn what type of images to use, and what to do with them once they’re uploaded.
Analytics
Personal Use
What are analytics? If you’ve only used social media for personal reasons to this point, you probably aren’t the only one asking this question. Before starting my internship, I certainly had no idea, and I use social media every day of my life.
Analytics are a way to collect data about your website or your Facebook business page, and they really don’t apply to a personal profile. Long story short, they have no personal use, and most people have never seen them.
Professional Use
Analytics are critically important to a successful social media campaign for a small business. You can use them to measure who is looking at your website, when they look at it, where they are, and what pages they click on. Facebook also has its own analytics program called Insights that measures data for your business page.
The information you gain from this data is crucial to the future success of your business. Without it, you will have a hard time tailoring your online marketing strategy to the specific needs of your business.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to your personal profile, analytics are nonexistent and unnecessary. When you use social media for a business, however, they are crucial to success.
They can be data-heavy and difficult to comprehend. That’s why it’s important to learn how to interpret them properly, so you can use this data to your advantage.
If you’re a millennial and you need to learn to use social media professionally, check out our Social Media Manager Learning Track. It’s the fast-track to a new career in digital marketing.