So you’re headed to Dreamforce in November. Is your social media game up to par? Yes, it's the digital age, but there are still plenty of people for whom social media is a mystery, and the thought of Tweeting, Facebooking, or Instagramming in the middle of a throng of thousands of Trailblazers, in the midst of the biggest conference experience of the year, can still be daunting.
This is part 1 of a 2-part blog to help the social media beginner up their social savvy game for #DF19. If you're not on the social train right now, this guide isn't going to make you a social sorcerer overnight. But you'll get a lesson or two, an insight or three, and learn how to make social media work for you and your organization.
Where to post and when?
Let's start with the basics: how often should you post? Do you post with the same frequency across channels? The answer to each essentially is "as much as you want," but there are guidelines that allow you to maximize the effectiveness of your social media and reach the widest audience possible.
Here are the guidelines for each major platform:
New Feed Post Frequency:
- Twitter 2-10x per day
- LinkedIn 1-4x per week
- Instagram 1-7x per week
- Facebook 1-7x per week
Stories
Twitter and Stories (Facebook + Instagram) are where you aim to post most frequently with live updates, etc. Twitter is the exception. below as it’s ideal to target at least 10+ tweets per day.
News Feed vs. Stories
Think of stories as a feed/updates of your day-to-day activity, while news feed/timeline posts are highlights or a summary of your day. Story posts disappear after 24 hours, while timeline posts remain in your feed forever.
#HASHTAGS
Hashtags are a type of metadata tag used on social media sites, meant to help users find messages of a certain type easily and conveniently. For example, if you are talking about Dreamforce and include the #Dreamforce tag, someone searching social media for Dreamforce posts will have easy access to your post (along with all others bearing that hashtag).
Hashtags are commonly misused on social media. Doing something like #thisisnothowthisworks is an ineffective hashtag, because very few people use that tag. Most of the more effective tags are short, punch, snappy, and are easily used by many people. For Dreamforce, the most commonly-used tags are #Dreamforce and #DF19.
Don’t overthink with hashtags because in reality and when looking at best practices, you really don’t need that many based on the network (minus Instagram). So keep it simple and focus on the event specific hashtags and ours of course :)
Number of Hashtags per post:
- Twitter 1-2 per tweet
- LinkedIn 1-5 per post
- Instagram 20-30 per post
- Facebook 1-5 per post
Suggested Hashtags for Dreamforce:
- #DF19 (official event hashtag)
- #Dreamforce
- #GoAppirio
- #SanFrancisco
- #SanFran
- #Salesforce
Instagram example:
Twitter example:
Hopefully you feel better prepared from a social media standpoint for this year’s Dreamforce. We can’t wait to connect with you on social and we’ll see you in San Francisco in November!
Have questions or feedback? Follow us on social media on our official Appirio handles and shoot us a DM! #GoAppirio
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