Being good at social media is important for everyone. And I mean everyone. From Starbucks to The Editing Company to your own personal account—recognizing the potential of a robust social media presence is key! For the rare breed of niche and underground businesses, not having some or all social media could potentially be a component of their brand. For the rest of us, social media efficiently tackles some big jobs: keeping in touch with our audience, sharing our products and services, receiving feedback and creating a sense of community.

I’ve been working as TEC’s Social Media Coordinator for the last four months. It’s been a blast so far! This blog is about some of the work we’ve been doing on the social media side and the key components that are readily transferable to your own social media strategy.

Show Off New Services

TEC recently introduced a new service called Page, Layout & Design. The service offers design work with the bonus of having the exacting eye of an editor prepare your work. The service was shared on our Twitter a few times a week. A common feature of all our tweets is a short graphic. The graphic is eye-catching, informative, and a great strategy for a little longevity in a forum where content otherwise enjoys a short lifespan. Another interesting takeaway is that Twitter graphics with text, even the same text as the tweet itself, are a very effective method of drawing attention.

Think about the way you scroll through Twitter. There are probably a ton of single line Tweets that you scroll right past, but an image of puppies? Someone recognizable? A video? You’re finger is now hovering a fraction over the phone screen and you take an extra second to read a short comic strip before the scrolling continues. For these reasons and more, graphics are an instant hit and a major component of your Twitter strategy!

How to Use Your Blog Resources

The Editing Company’s blog is a treasure trove of resources. Our editors tackle various topics every week and share their insights. The TEC editors have written on everything from the prefix “post-” to strategies writers can use to find agents. With all of this quality content, we want to make sure that the articles reach the audience. However good your content is, if no one’s looking at it, then what’s the point? To make sure our articles are getting out there and seeing the light of day, we post each blog on our Twitter. We tweet about our blog once a week and each tweet will have its own graphic.

It’s important to note that retweeting is a wonderful and amazing tool. You should fully take advantage of rehashing old material or simply resurfacing it with a quick retweet. Bringing back older material keeps your social media active, allows you to draw a little extra attention to your old stuff, and saves you time on planning. When you post to Twitter, add a graphic! For a tweet about blog content, a clean graphic with the title of the article is sufficient for grabbing attention!

Try Out Campaigns

The most exciting part of our recent Twitter activity has been the August Twitter raffle! TEC celebrated a monumental 10 years in business this year. And to close out the celebrations, we decided to do a #NextTenAtTEC giveaway! As part of the campaign, we created prize packs for winners that included some TEC merchandise (pens, coasters, discounts on services, gift cards etc). The campaign took to Twitter and asked for folks to follow and retweet our promotional tweet in order to win the prize pack. The graphic is being distributed three times a week with a winner announced every Wednesday. We are in the first week of the raffle. The results are coming in slowly, but they’re better than anticipated.

For this campaign, we ask people to retweet and follow the post. For this reason, our tweet circulated in a number of far-reaching spaces. We also connected with a steadily growing number of followers. The campaign drums up increased engagement with our social media and reminds the community that our business is busy, thriving, and very much active.

Another thing to keep in mind when putting together a social media campaign is the timing at which you start the campaign. The best case scenario is beginning a contest that sets out to do more than one thing. Every contest targets engagement, but what about increasing clicks to your profile? These profile visits mean more people are aware of your business. The more people who know about your business, the more likely you will receive new clients. Or even better—what if you launched a new service alongside this contest? Which is exactly what we did! One of the prizes in the prize package includes discounts to our Page, Layout & Design service (but can also be redeemed for any editing project). And in this way, we promote our service while still reminding followers to participate in the contest. Raffles and contests are great ways to engage with the community. When you do start one, be sure to strategize well! Take advantage of almost guaranteed success.

Writing Clean Copy

This last bit is not so much about our social media, but the copy of social media in general. On Twitter, take advantage of hashtagging and mentioning others. Curating tweets so that they include some of these features will positively influence their reach. Even though you have a character limit, be conscientious of unwieldy and chunky copy. Social media copy at its finest is crisp, clean, and very easy to read. When you balance all of these elements together, you have an incredibly beautiful Twitter page. And don’t thank me—thank Twitter for giving us all very intriguing opportunities with a user-friendly interface. And we at TEC wish you the best in your social media journey! 

Want a monthly editing tip? Sign up for our monthly newsletter and have 
helpful editing tips delivered directly to your inbox.