Social Media Channels: Do I need to invest in more than one?

Time to read: 3 minutes

A persistent question for B2B companies is whether social media channels have real value. And, if so, which channels are worth the investment. Our social media expert, Simona Cotta Ramusino, shares her views on the best approach.

The outages that have impacted WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram in recent years provided an important lesson for social media managers: make sure you are on multiple platforms. However, another reason B2B firms should nurture multiple social media channels is that they fulfil different purposes.

The way I see it, LinkedIn is about describing who you are, Twitter is about doing what you are, and Facebook is about showing who you are.

Let’s hear it for LinkedIn

LinkedIn remains one of the preferred social media channels for our B2B clients.

According to some recent stats, the platform drives 46% of social traffic to B2B sites and is considered the most credible content source. Other numbers supporting the business case for having a LinkedIn presence include:

• 4 out of 5 people on the platform “drive business decisions”
• there are 61 million “senior-level influencers”
• 33% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn to research purchases

As a fully integrated communications agency, we see LinkedIn management as a key piece of the comms plan.

4 reasons we love LinkedIn

1. You can build your company’s profile within your sector. As your competitors will also likely be on LinkedIn, it is important to be seen and promote your latest company news, updates, and wins.
2. You can promote thought leadership and highlight your company’s experts. This helps put focus on the individuals driving the business as well as your products and services.
3. You can directly engage with peers, clients, and prospects. As with many social media platforms, LinkedIn supports two-way communication, allowing followers to comment on and share your updates. You can also gather their views through polls and posts.
4. You can have a positive impact on employees and attract new hires. Understanding a company’s culture is key when deciding whether it will be the right fit for you. It is no longer a leap of faith or a ‘grass is always greener’ scenario: LinkedIn (and Facebook) can help you understand what it is or would be like working for a certain company.

LinkedIn has also added some interesting new features over the last year to improve user experience and make engagement with followers more interesting:

• LinkedIn Polls
• LinkedIn Live
• Carousels for posts

Also, not quite as new (but still worth noting) is the option to set an event under your company profile, share it with connections, and invite connections to follow your company page.

Is there life beyond LinkedIn for B2B firms?

Yes! Twitter/X is great if you attend virtual or live events and want to share snippets from presentations or keynotes. It also allows you to follow and engage with key influencers in your space, with many analysts and journalists tweeting regularly. However, whether Twitter/X is still an environment in which you want to place your brand is a different question altogether. As content moderation has been all but removed, many brands are leaving the platform.

Facebook is probably the best platform to showcase your culture, the people that make the company a great place to be, and any CSR projects you may be engaged in. It also helps to create a strong feeling of community among employees and is a powerful means of attracting new, like-minded people.

If you are a business that relies more on visual marketing, then Instagram is the place to be. The platform is optimised for videos and images so products and services can be brought to a target audience more engagingly, building trust and increasing traffic to your website. Although Instagram is often disregarded by B2B marketers and viewed mainly as a B2C channel, there are stats and business reasons that support the value of having a presence on the platform:

“B2B companies experience their largest engagement ratios on Instagram—meaning that of the major social sites, Instagram fosters the highest number of interactions per number of followers. Not only does Instagram promote engagement through commenting, but it hosts text, photos, and videos directly on the platform so your followers don’t have to click elsewhere to see the content.”

So, if you are upping your social media game or hiring someone to do it for you, establish what you want to achieve and who you want to reach. Equipped with this knowledge, selecting the right platform or platforms becomes much easier.

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Can anyone be a Social Media Manager?

Time to read: 2 minutes

Simona Cotta Ramusino shares her experience and the lessons learned after years of working as a social media manager for several FinTech clients.

Many people presume that because they can curate their own feeds, the same rules apply to managing a corporate feed. I have found that this is rarely the case.

Social media can’t stand alone

Possibly because of my PR background, but for me, social media has to mirror what the PR machine does. It has to communicate a clear profile of the company, its people and its values and use the same key messages to help present a consistent image. It must also promote key spokespeople as industry thought leaders. I am lucky to have often covered both PR and social media consultant roles. This means I can reflect on the tone and type of language used in social media posts.

I know what news a client would be interested in amplifying and what owned content is coming out that we can repurpose for socials. Big global firms may have these two roles fulfilled by more than one person. If that’s the case, ensure you are only a desk or a Skype/Zoom/Microsoft Teams message away from the PR manager so you can work in synergy.

Scheduling is the perfect mix of science and art

Most scheduling tools suggest the best times to schedule a post on different social media platforms. Most of the time, these suggestions are useful. However, don’t let the robots take over. Human intervention still makes the difference.

• Who is the audience for this piece of news?
• Where are they located?
• Which channels do they favour?
• Is it a big piece of insight that may be better to read at the end of the day?
• Or is it a video that should be watched during your lunch break?
• Is this a good blog post to read as you sit at your desk in the morning?
• Where / when is this [virtual] event taking place?

That’s at least what I think when scheduling posts. Choose the right time zone to catch your audience at the right time. Pick the right social channels to post to make sure you reach the right audience.

Talk your audience’s talk

Using the correct language is key. I mainly cover corporate social media accounts, where the audience is comprised of journalists, analysts, entrepreneurs, and senior financial services figures. For me, it is paramount that the language clients use on social channels is appropriate to reach their audience.

Here are my two key rules when writing posts:

• Eats, shoots & leaves. Avoiding grammar mistakes and typos is key, particularly on LinkedIn, because this is where your peers and your clients’ peers are.
• Appropriateness of tone. You will be surprised by how many blunders are made daily, how often a brand (or an individual) has had to backtrack because a tweet thought of as a joke was offensive – see @PureGym post comparing a hard workout to ’12 Years of Slave’.
• Apply a common sense filter. For example, when deciding whether a piece of company news is for internal or external consumption. Does the whole world need to see pictures of the company Christmas party? No. Are you issuing a release about an acquisition? If you are a listed company, you may have some time restraints on when to do this, so ensure you are aligned with your PR Communications Team.

Different platform, same rules

For me, managing corporate social media channels is like any other role in communications. You must build your experience and knowledge, learn from your peers and always follow corporate communications best practices. Maybe not as much fun as you imagined, but it’s effective.

One year on: Hindsight advice for going freelance

Time to read: 2 minutes

Simona Cotta Ramusino shares lessons learned from her first year as a freelance PR and digital marketing consultant:

So, it’s already been a year since I took the plunge into freelancing, and it’s certainly been a crazy, scary, and self-rewarding time.

As the summer approached, I remember starting tentatively, triple-checking every email and running every action past Sam. But after a few weeks, I found my feet …and my voice.

As I started working with different clients and different accounts, I rediscovered the real me. A more confident “me” who could actively participate in new prospects’ meetings, produce good writing and develop interesting suggestions for her clients without fear of saying the wrong thing.

Work freelance? Here’s how to say, “I’m working, GO AWAY!”

Time to read: 2 minutes

Freelance digital marketing pro, Simona Cotta Ramusino advises managing interruptions when you work from home.

Nothing to see here, folks! Just someone trying to work for a living…

Before working freelance, I spent over 10 years in various PR agencies where timekeeping was essential.

You often had to juggle:

• More than one client at once
• More than one task a day
• A certain amount of hours each day

I have always prided myself on being a good timekeeper, able to multi-task and deliver work on time. But things changed a little bit when I took the plunge into freelancing, not through any fault of mine!

I want to share this with you – freelancers and freelancers-to-be – because you will experience this, particularly at the beginning of your new career.

People don’t realise freelance work is real work

Time management as a freelancer becomes more difficult because people (mainly friends and family) don’t think you’re working. They don’t really know what you do, just that you’re at the computer for a couple of hours in between housework, food shopping, or the gym.

Sound familiar? This misconception leads them to ask if you can grab a coffee in the afternoon, babysit, or call in for a mid-morning chat.

So, although I may have a strict work routine to be at my desk at 9.00, have a lunch break, and be finished at 18.00, other people don’t. That’s how my time management goes out of the window, and ‘external sources’ disrupt my day.

Because they are family or friends, it’s hard to say, “I’m working, go away” without sounding rude. But you have to. The sooner you do, the better. And stick to it. You will be resented for a while, but it will be your saving grace in the long run.

What if your partner works from home, too?

I have the added challenge that my husband also often works from home. I must admit that we had a few ‘discussions’ when I started freelancing. We’ve now got to a stage where we close our office door if we don’t want to be disturbed.

I know we both mean well when we interrupt each other, but I don’t want to spend an hour on the same sentence when I am writing something and get interrupted many times (“What do you want for lunch?” “When do you want lunch?” “What should we do for dinner?”…etc.).

One could say that if you were in an office, you would get interrupted anyway. However, a colleague wouldn’t come near you if they saw you madly typing on your laptop. If they did, you can ask them to return later, and they wouldn’t think that was rude. And so should your family and friends.

So, I advise treating your freelance work time as if you were in an office. Be diligent and respectful with your time; your family and friends will be too. Whether you work from 7.00 to 15.00, 10.00 to 18.00, or 12.00 to 19.00, that is business time.

Like any agency, your timesheets should show how hard you worked that day.

Plunge into freelance work, it refreshes your soul…

Time to read: 2 minutes

From the newest member of the team, digital marketing diva and freelance work specialist – Simona Cotta Ramusino 

Reality has finally hit. I have updated my LinkedIn profile with my new job title, so it must be true: I am a PR and Digital Marketing Freelancer.

After 20 years of working for top-class agencies and in-house marketing departments of international brands, I have decided to take the plunge into freelancing. Making the decision to go freelance was a scary moment. I am just beginning to get to grips with my new status. In just a short period of time, I have already come to appreciate and enjoy and won’t change my mind any time soon. Why? Well, you need to know how I got into freelancing.

It’s thanks to Sam

Sam and I worked together a few years ago. One of her talents is reading people’s strengths and personalities and making them work well within a team. When I asked Sam for advice on whether I should join her band of freelancers, she knew my type well: I am not a risk taker. I always have to think things through and always need a Plan B (or C or D). Sam not only laid out the naked truth about the freelance world, but she also made sure I didn’t have too much time to think over the cons the new path would entail. She got me straight to work as part of the Comms Crowd gang.

The “plunge” came with an important life lesson

As I started reconnecting and talking to previous colleagues, they all agreed it was a great career move for me, some even wondered why I hadn’t done this sooner. It surprised me. They knew more about me, about my skills and talent than I did. At the end it was their support and comments that gave me that final push and made me realise it was indeed a career change, it wasn’t something temporary, something I could do in my spare time or just as I was looking for something else. It was my new job title.

To answer my initial question on why I wouldn’t change being a freelancer this is because it lets me use all the communications skills I have learned through the years and apply them for a variety of clients that an agency wouldn’t even have on their books. I also feel it has elevated me professionally and it is giving me so much satisfaction, both professionally and personally. Because the relationships I establish with my clients seem to be more on a par, the recognition I receive for my work feels more personal and genuine.

So while some people may decide to go down the freelance route because they want a better work/life balance or be their own boss, for me these are just by-products. Freelancing means doing what you do best and enjoying it!