What Should Radio Stations Post On Social Media?
Alan Coote
Content and Development Director
What’s the anatomy of a great post? Put simply, here’s your checklist – pin it to the wall. Every post should be relevant, timely, captivating and elicited an action or reaction.
Imagine for a moment that our social media page is a hotel, restaurant or car dealership. We’re only going to post a very narrow type of content that directly relates to the business – local places to go, food porn pics, or sexy car shots.
Radio stations have a much broader group of fans, so publish a much wider range of content. This can be a double-edged sword because if your content doesn’t get initial engagement from your followers it’s going to fail to get any meaningful reach at all.
Relevant content can be a local news story or a story that you’ve put a local spin on. It can be about an event effecting most of your followers or something which most of them feel passionate about.
Timely content works differently on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and each of the other social media platforms. And has a lot to do with how the algorithms work which I go through in the video on ‘How to get more Followers’.
As a radio person, you already know that what you do on-air should always be captivating. This is no different on social media. While on Radio you may only have their ears, on social media you have their eye too. So, the trick is to use great visual images, bold captions and videos where you can. Every post on social media should be like every link that you do on-air. Ask yourself what image, caption text or video clip will get people really engaged with the post’s content?
Where possible it should elicit a response and this can take many forms. In, social media speak that’s called engagement. It’s a score given by the number of clicks, comments, shares, likes and if it’s a video the watch time. The best posts are conversation starters or pose an open-ended question.
All that sound like a lot of work. So you should automate some if not all of this social media management.
To repost other people’s content, you can use tools like ‘Zapier’ and ‘If This Then That’. These tools allow you to connect social media accounts together and get data from other sources like RSS news feeds.
For your original content, you could use our tool called Live Drive which dynamically produces video content as well as the all-important text for each post. Not only is Live Drive a time-saver; it is also being used by radio stations to monetise their social media.