Best Practice Tips For Social Media
- Lauren Hackett
- Aug 15
- 5 min read
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It can be very easy to set-up social media profiles, but a lot more difficult to utilise them to perform best for your business. In this article we will offer some best practice tips to help make the most of social media. 3 Ways to Make Social Media Work For You
Create Entertaining content
The type of content that you create and share on your pages really matters and according to recent research, to have success on Social media, you need to create entertaining content which fits one or more of these categories: relatable, entertaining/amusing, or educational. Social Media Content Plan for Florists with Examples
Low-fi content works better than highly polished content
You don’t need a lot of fancy camera or recording equipment in order to create content that performs well on social media. It’s been proven that slick and polished, or more corporate looking videos will not perform as well as something filmed on a camera phone that looks a bit imperfect. Viewers want to see authenticity and more ‘real’ content and that means they like it when things are a bit wonky, things don’t sound perfectly scripted, etc. So don’t worry if what you’re posting isn’t perfect.
Over-explain things in descriptions/captions to help with Social SEO
Social SEO (which stand for Search Engine Optimisation) is all about whether you appear top of the search results pages when people type in certain keywords into the search bar on a social media channel. Social SEO is becoming a bigger thing as people (especially younger audiences) use social media more than Google to search for resources, content or answers to questions. Ensuring to have keywords and descriptions of exactly what is going on within a post/video is very important to help your page or video/post appear higher up the search results page.
A few tips on improving this:
o Make sure all videos have subtitles.
o Make sure keywords are within the subtitles and within text displayed on the screen (the algorithms will read on screen text as part of their SEO crawl).
o Ensure keywords are included within the caption on posts, being more explicit about what the content is about, e.g saying things like "look at this florist website" rather than "look at this" or "look at this website".
When we talk about ‘keywords’, these are the words most associated with you and what you do, so for example for a florist, the first thing that comes to mind is: “Floristry shop”.
Actually spelling these things out as “Floristry shop” rather than just putting “shop” can help you tell Instagram or Facebook what you are about, even though someone reading it is likely to know without needing to be that explicit.
Engaging with followers
Liking and commenting on posts from other accounts (on both Facebook and Instagram) helps to both generate and foster that sense of community that people using social media like, as well as being a way new people can find you. For example if you comment on someone else’s post then all of their followers will be able to see your comment and they may go onto your page from there and follow you. 8 Ways your Business Can Benefit from Building Local Community Links
Leverage AI Tools for Smarter Posting
AI tools like Chat GPT, Co-pilot and Gemini can now help you with generating captions for your posts, and even suggest content ideas to post on your social media based on current trends, or if you're just stuck on what to say. There are so many ways you can use AI to your advantage in a small business that go beyond just social media but it's a good place to start. These tools can save time and improve performance and can be more efficient. Start Here: AI for Small Businesses
Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)
People love to see authenticity and 'real' content - they trust these types of posts more than polished content from businesses. Seeing other individual's experiences by you reposting UGC can build trust with potential new customers who haven't heard of or used you before. Ask your customers to tag you in their posts or share their experiences - you could even give them an incentive for doing this like a discount off their next order - and then repost their content (with their permission of course) to promote your business.
Instagram specific advice
Instagram in a very visual platform and the realm of floristry is too so it is a perfect fit for the platform. Here are our best tips to succeed on Instagram. Social Media Tips for Florists
Post Reels Regularly
Try to post at least one Reel per week – ideally 1-3 per week but it depends on how much time you have to do this. Based on current trends, video content and Reels are what Instagram are pushing more to people over static posts and Instagram’s algorithms prefer accounts who are actively supporting this switch to more video content rather than static content so uploading regularly can help you get seen by more people. Reels that you post don’t have to be complicated, some audio and a few images or a short video clip are ideal.
Series Reels or Posts
A collection or videos all around one theme can perform well over time. If someone who doesn’t follow you sees one of your posts within the series and likes one, they’re likely to go to your page to find more. Content could be A-Z style or it could be “Day 1 of 10 tips for XXX” releasing one per day means people are more likely to come back and see the rest of the tips on a daily basis.
Short Reels with further information and detail in the comments
This is an increasingly popular technique that performs well. Further to the above point about posting regularly, often videos that are maybe 10 seconds long perform just as well or sometimes better than longer videos.
Always use Trending audio
Trending audio gets you more views on videos. You can look for trending audio when watching reels on the app and if you see a small arrow next to the audio name, this means it’s Trending. You can also search for #trendingsongs or #trendingsounds which can help find you trending audio.
Use less hashtags
When Instagram was initially created, hashtags used to be the main way people found new content. They were in all best practice guides about how to get found, where the more you used, the better it was. This is not the case anymore. Instagram themselves now recommend not using lots of hashtags and instead using no more than 3-5 hashtags on a post. Make sure these are relevant to the content and include keywords the target audience would be looking for.
Use more video within reels
These don’t have to be long, even a couple of seconds of a situation and stitching 4-5 of these together can tell a story better than 4-5 photographs. If you are using a phone with “live photos” you may already have these short video clips within the photo, but just need to export these to use them in videos. See this guide on how to do it on an iPhone or iPad. Top 7 FREE Video & Photo Editing Apps to Promote Your Floristry Business
