There’s no doubt that social media is here to stay. It’s either you or someone you know is using one social network or the other to stay in touch with friends, loved ones or their favourites brands. For this reason, many marketing savvy businesses have signed-up to one social network or the other where they know they can engage with their target audience.

It’s great for your business to boast of having an account on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin Google+ or Pinterest, but sooner than later you come to realize that’s it’s one thing to signup on a social media network and it’s quite another to get positive results from your social media accounts.

For you to get the most out of social media for your business, you need to know when, what and how to post.

When to Post

Do you post once a day or several times a day? Do you post regularly or once in a blue moon? Do you have a schedule on when to post or do you post on the spur of the moment? Do you get better response when you post in the morning than at other times of the day? Do you get more likes or retweets during the weekdays than weekends or maybe during holidays?

For best results, you need to study your target audience to know when and how often they would be most receptive engaging with your brand. You can only know this by studying your pasts posts and tweets to know which ones made more impact.

Once you have studied your target audience and determined when to post, you then need to draw up a schedule and keep to that schedule as as to guarantee that you get more results from social media.

What to Post

After you determine the best time to post, the next step is to determine what to post that will spur your fans or followers to engage with your posts. Does your audience engage more with video than photos or text? Do they engage more with ‘How to’ tips, polls or survey?

Remember that your business is not the only one struggling to gain the attention of people. So as far as social media is concerned, content that spurs engagement is king. Focus on providing great content that will attract the attention of your fans and followers getting them to like, comment, retweet or plus one your content. That engagement of your audience with your posts is what counts!

Do your research thoroughly to determine what type of content your audience likes, comments, retweets most and generate more of that type of content to satisfy their appetite. For best results remember and apply the 80:20 rule i.e. 80% of your content should be focused on things that can benefit your audience and 20% on selling your products and services. Do not bombard your audience with information about your business only. Social media is not the place for hard selling your business.

How to Post

Now that you have determined when and what to post, the next thing is to determine how best to posts! Are you going to login to your accounts manually and post or are you going to use a third party app?

There are several third party tools and apps available today that help users manage their various social media accounts effortlessly usually from one single dashboard. They are great time savers as they eliminate the need for login into several different social networks multiple times in a day and having to remember all those user id’s and passwords. All you need to do is sign into one account to monitor and manage all your social media accounts from a single dashboard.

You can schedule your post hours, days, weeks or even months ahead to be posted at the precise time you desire, you can engage in meaningful conversations with your fans and followers and monitor their mentions and opinions of your brand on the various social networks. Each tool has its advantage and disadvantages so you may probably end up using a combination of two or more of them for best results.

A note a caution: some social networks like Facebook (with its EdgeRank algorithm) usually prefer its users to manually login to their accounts to post rather than using third party tools. So the best thing is not to go overboard with these tools.

Are you getting great results from social media? Share your experience in the comments below.