5 minBoth new and well-established MSPs should be using social media to grow their following, generate leads, and increase sales. Growing your MSP with social media may seem like a massive project, but it’s easier than ever to use social channels to connect with existing and potential customers and grow your brand organically for free. Just follow these MSP tips for social media and you’ll find success for your business in no time.
Whether your MSP is just getting started using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn or you’ve been active for years, there is always room for improvement. In this article, we’ll cover social media tricks and MSP tips that you can apply to optimize your social media marketing.
Benefits of Social Media for MSPs
Before we dive into our social media tips for MSPs, we want to share a few of the incredible benefits of using social:
- Increased brand awareness for your MSP
- Grow a larger audience
- Connect with your audience better
- Increased website traffic
- Generate more leads
- Make more sales and money
- Improve customer support and satisfaction
Best Social Media MSP Tips
- Devise a Social Sharing Strategy
Firstly, this is probably the thing most MSPs neglect when jumping into social media platforms. You can post, tweet, and comment all day, but if you don’t have a plan and strategy you’ll likely never achieve promising results.
It’s important that you understand why your MSP is using social media. Do you want to generate more leads, answer support questions, engage with the broader MSP community, a combination of those reasons, or maybe a different reason entirely? Only once you have a strategy for your social channels that fits your business objective, should you move on to execution.MSP Tips: We wouldn’t recommend a goal of becoming: “Instagram famous”.
- Understand your target audience
Similar to developing a social media strategy, make sure that you think about your messaging and where you are meeting the customer during their journey. Do you want to focus on engaging with your existing customers or connect with potential customers? Should your MSP’s content be very buttoned-up and professional or more playful and full of emojis? In short, decide who your audience is and your message and content should reflect that.
MSP Tips: Your audience may be different for the various social media platforms. According to Pew Research, YouTube and Facebook are the most widely used online platforms, while smaller shares of Americans use sites such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- Set up a social media content calendar
You don’t want managing your MSP’s social media accounts to be a major time suck for your team. Sit down once or twice a week to brainstorm topics, write the messaging, develop the visual assets (photos, videos, etc.), and schedule them to be posted. With that in mind, we recommend a few tools below that’ll help you easily set up and schedule posts.
MSP Tips: Along with your scheduled posts, make sure you keep an eye on trends in the MSP industry. If you notice that a particular topic is growing in popularity and it aligns with your message, then you can capitalize and drive engagement with your brand.
- Optimize your post content
There are a number of variables (besides the specific content) that can determine the success of your social media, including post frequency, post time, and hashtags. Every audience is unique, so test posting on different days and times and compare the engagement activity. You’ll also want to consider which hashtags to add to your social media posts. Hashtags, like #managedservices or #IoT can engage a wider audience.Interesting Fact: Using too many hashtags can often lead to lowering engagement. Data from LINCHPINSEO shows “Tweets that use more than two hashtags actually show a 17% drop in engagement.”
Source: https://www.socialpilot.co/blog/social-media-marketing-tips
- Authenticity is key
We think it’s very important to humanize your brand. You can do this by responding to comments or brand mentions, posting photos of your team around the office, at a job site, or wandering a conference floor. These posts aren’t all about the “sale” and help introduce your audience to your team – the humans behind the MSP brand.
- Make video a part of your content
It should come as no surprise to IT Professionals and MSPs that video content is booming. Users are engaging more than ever with video content on platforms like Youtube, IGTV (Instagram), and Facebook Live.
Fun fact: Testing shows that a Tweet containing a video is 6x more likely to be retweeted than a Tweet with a photo or just text. Not only can video content be more engaging, but the platforms prefer it as well, using algorithms to prioritize it.
- Turn Customers into Brand Ambassadors
We’ve found at Domotz, that our existing customers are great at selling our product. Why’s that? Because prospects in the buying and research phase love to hear from happy customers how and why they use the service. We recommend creating posts that share customer quotes, reviews, and case studies that will offer prospects assurance and guidance. Make sure you ask them for permission before sharing with the world.
- Use tools to simplify the creation process
There are many tools that will make your life easier and your MSP more successful on social media. Many tools allow you to manage all of your accounts in one place, follow trends happening on social platforms, schedule posts for your content calendar, and engage in conversation with your followers. Here are a few that we’d recommend testing in a free trial:
- Buffer: https://buffer.com/
- Hootsuite: https://hootsuite.com/
- Sproutsocial: https://sproutsocial.com/
- Tailwind: https://www.tailwindapp.com/
- Later: https://later.com
- Make your content look great
For social media posts, images are super important. Here’s a quick list of some great sites you can use to get free images for your content:
- Be “social”
When you can, join in the conversation. If someone mentions your MSP in social media you should respond so they know there is a real person on the other end. You can also land great clients by tweeting with them, sharing their posts, or having other small social interactions that can lead to big deals!
- Ask for help
Be sure to add your social follow buttons to email signatures, marketing emails, your website etc. Don’t be shy to ask friends and family for help in following your channels/liking your content while getting started. You can even ask your customers to follow your channels on a one to one basis.
Example outreach email: “Hey customer! Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram for the latest tips on keeping your network secure, working efficiently and safe!”
- Pay a little to boost a lot
If you want to take your social media to the next level, we recommend experimenting with different types of advertising. You can quickly build engagement with your posts and increase site visitors from social ads to grow your business. A few types of ads include Promoted Posts, Sponsored Stories, and Targeted Ads. Start with a small budget and test various designs, messaging, call to actions, and landing pages before you invest too much of your budget. Again, it’s very important when you are spending money to think about your audience and how you can best target them on each channel.
- BONUS TIP: Dive into your analytics
We know how important it is to keep labor and costs down as an MSP. Most importantly, make sure you’re getting good results with your social activity as well. Measure your efforts by tracking the engagement and ROI of your social media channels. Facebook Insights offers analytics for your fan page.
Put these MSP tips for social media to use
According to research, Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities and in 2019, 79 percent of the population in the United States had a social networking profile. Now that you know the most up to date best practices and have our MSP tips for social media tips, get out there and make the most of it!
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