A guest post by Kim Brittingham
Chances are excellent that you have a smartphone. And if you do, you probably use that smartphone to check Facebook, browse Twitter, read or write blog posts, see what’s happening on MySpace, or pin to Pinterest. Among other social media-related things.
And if you’re doing all of that, so are your fans– the ones you have now, and the millions you hope to win over in the future. It makes sense, then, that your social media efforts should be optimized for mobile use.
That might sound like a big, technical undertaking, but actually, there are a few things you can (and should) be doing even at the level of “basic user”. They can only improve your odds of reaching more people and making them fall in love with you. Start with these:
– Skip tiny and hard-to-read fonts. Sometime you may find yourself in the position of choosing a font. If you’re using WordPress to build a band blog or website, for example, even if you’re using a template, you may be offered a choice of fonts (although most WordPress templates automatically generate an easy-to-navigate mobile version). Or maybe you’re designing an image with text to share on your Facebook page. Do your fans a favor and opt for a clean, crisp font that reads well on the screen of a smartphone – that is, if you want them to stay fans, and if you want them to share your social media stuff. And you definitely do. That’s where new fans come from.
– Test what you post on different devices. In a perfect world, everything we post – whether it be a photo, a link, whatever – would work uniformly on every type of device: Android phone, iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, etc. Sadly, our world is still largely imperfect. So whenever possible, get a gander of your social media content on more than one device. How does it look and work on your tablet versus your smartphone? This is the only way I know to discover little quirks that, on certain devices, make your content annoyingly useless. But once you fix one of those quirks, you’ll get into a routine of creating content that appears and works reliably on pretty much anything with a screen. It’s a matter of trial and error, but it’s worth the time it takes.
– Post at the smartest possible time. That means putting some thought into who your target audience is and when you think they’re most likely to be using a particular social media platform. Even the most enthusiastic social media users aren’t scrolling Facebook 24/7. So when are they online? And specifically, where? For example, is your target fan 14 years old and sitting in school most of the day, Monday through Friday? Their access to social media might be limited by day. But come 3:00 or so when school lets out, deprived teens desperate to check Facebook and Twitter may be flooding those platforms. It might be the ideal time to unroll certain messages, photos, etc. And through experimentation, you may also find that the “after dinner” hour is a particularly active time for your target audience on MySpace. Keep in mind time zones, too. If your target audience is Americans in all time zones, you may want to stagger your social media messages to reach fans at the same hour, but in several zones. Now that we’re accessing so much social media with mobile devices, we may be “checking in” more often, but we’re spending shorter spurts of time on each visit. You have a small window to reach your target. Do your best to be there when they are, or they might miss you completely.
Kim Brittingham is an in-demand writer, social media and blog steward. She’s also the author of two books: Write That Memoir Right Now (2013, AudioGo) and Read My Hips (2011, Random House). Visit her website/blog at www.KimWrites.com.
