I‘m gearing up for classes to start in one week! It’s been a super fun summer, with lots of travel and fun (you can read about it here), but now fall’s here and it’s time to buckle down and get back to work! By the way, if you’re interested, my Social Media for Business courses are full, but there’s still some space in my WordPress and Niche Blogging classes. Moving on! One of the things I talk about a lot in my classes is best practices. I get asked about social media best practices all the time–things like:

• how often to post
• when to post
• what kind of content to post

To some degree, many of these things are dependent upon what kind of a business you run, but here are some basic social media best practices:

• You can’t just participate in any social network one-way. You can’t just post to the network. You have to get in there and interact with other people. It’s a relationship.
• You should probably be posting to most of your social networks at least once a day. I post to my FB biz page at least once a day, sometimes 2-3 times per day. That’s okay, as long as the content is spaced out (use FB’s scheduler feature) and it’s not all about you. Aim to add value with 80% of your posts. I post to Twitter a minimum of 5 times a day, but that might be a bit much for some people. I suggest ideally, 1-3 times per day. You can get away with tweeting more, because Twitter moves very fast, and tweets have a short lifespan.
• Balance the personal and the professional. Remember, everything on the interenets lives forever. So, don’t stay dumb stuff (like CeeLo), and always try to be polite and professional. On the other hand, also try to integrate some personal stuff into your social media–don’t be business all the time. You don’t want to come across as a robot–you want people to know that a real, living, breathing human being is behind the tweets. So do talk about your cat or your Aunt Sally’s birthday or how your garden is growing.
• Watch your cross-posting. It’s super tempting to hook all of your social media feeds up to each other, and then just write one thing and let ‘er rip. But do this sparingly. Not all social networks work the same, so what works for one, may not work for another. Repurpose instead.

For more info, here’s your infographic!