10 tips for making social media more manageable 

Even the biggest brands struggle to manage a presence across the plethora of social media outlets where customers increasingly spend their time. Whether you're short on inspiration, time, or knowhow, here are 10 tips from top Creative Agency This Here to supercharge your social marketing.

1. Go visual It's often easier to take a photo than compose a pithy one liner, and good imagery stands out from crowded social streams. Try using Instagram as your primary channel by default the images and videos save to your phone's Photos folder; from here you can repost them via tools like Buffer (see below).
2. Keep it brief you're competing for attention, so text-wise, whatever you say needs to be understood in a fraction of a second. A good rule of thumb is to keep text to less than 100 characters on any social post.
3. Stagger your posts by scheduling a tool such as Buffer allows you to queue up 10 posts at a time (more if you can spare $10 per month). People use social media while commuting, out at lunch, in the evening, and even in bed. Meanwhile most brands are posting only during working hours; schedule posts for evenings and weekends and you're already ahead of the competition.
4. Easy on the hashtags while hitting the hash key can be a fun way to engage and identify with your audience, more than one hashtag and your message doesn't scan so well. If you do join in a conversational hashtag, always check the context it's easy to get caught out by a seemingly innocent trend referencing a sensitive subject.
5. Don't bank on Facebook just because it's the most popular social site in the UK, that doesn't make it the easiest place to reach customers. If you want to reach the right users at the right time, you're probably better off paying than hoping your message will reach any more than 2 or 3% of your audience. Unless you've got a large existing fan base, it's easier to get greater reach on other platforms, particularly Twitter and Instagram.
6. Make it topical a potent way to connect with customers is through conversation around relevant, timely events, from Pancake Day to humanity landing a robot on a comet. Use Twitter's #OwnTheMoment Planner to find and discover relevant happenings and then turn your mind to creative ways to talk about them. Just avoid shoehorning your brand into an irrelevant topic.
7. Experiment with Paid Social although many social media marketers loathe to pay for reach, it's at least worth testing both Facebook and Twitter's self-serve ads. The targeting can be quite astounding, and advanced users can achieve remarkable results with conversion pixels and multivariate testing.
8. Get your audience to tell your story few of us have the time or creativity to come up with new content day in day out. Brands like Daniel Wellington have achieved extraordinary results (over 500k followers) by incentivising their customers to share photos of their product.
9. Test the water don't be afraid to try out more niche social platforms such as Pinterest or Tumblr if they seem like a good fit, but equally be prepared to put them on hold if you're not getting much traction. And don't ignore the less sexy, older platforms.
10. Forget email at your peril for most it's the most precious digital channel of all; few can give you the engagement rates or click-throughs of this 44-year-old tech. Capture email addresses at every touch point use Twitter lead gen cards, social media competitions, and of course a web form.

This Here are a data-fuelled creative agency, working with brands, agencies, and personalities to provide strategic direction, insight and analysis, training and system design, as well as full-spectrum branding, social campaigns, and content conception and production. Practising what they preach, they recommend you sign up for their fortnightly email for more tips and tricks.