Social Media Best Practices Manual
Rationale
Keeping on top of current trends and competitor actions is extremely important when it comes to social media and digital marketing, as in order to be successful yourselves, you need to be current and innovative, whilst still following industry best practices. This sparked initiative within our team to create a manual that we could share with our clients to include some crucial information about their competition set, data analytics, notable mentions about their activity compared to their main competitors, and lastly best practices for choosing and capturing the best places/details of the hotel or restaurant with the appropriate light and angle. Using our manual, together with our client we can produce high quality content and capitalise on bookings, followers and engagement.
Goal
As part of our research and development, we created a tailor-made manual for our client consisting of some tips for how to take high quality photography, and an insight into some competitors. Our goal from this action was to show some in depth analysis of what kind of content the main competitors are posting, in order to see what kind of content performs well in the appropriate industry. This could then be used to prompt some ideas and future direction for the photography and content ideas for our clients’ social media, with the end goal to increase their social media followers, website clicks and bookings. As much as the manual is helpful for our internal digital marketing team to use, it is also helpful for our client, where we outlined best practices for taking F&B and hotel photos from the right angles, corners and with the appropriate light and tools.
Strategy
Our strategy consisted first of studying and analysing the Novotel Canary Wharf and Bokan competition set by having an overview of their content, how it is visualised and the captions written for each post. We did this in order to understand what competitors do, their main trends, key takeaways and drawbacks. This is extremely important in order to exceed the competition and become the first choice in consumers’ preferences. Secondly, our team did a deep and tailor-made strategy to find the best practices for F&B & Hotel photography mainly, light, shooting with a smartphone or camera and lastly angles and corners for shooting.
How to create a manual?
1. Find the top 5 competitors for your brand
2. Understand the main similarities and differences between your brand and your competitors
3. Analyse the competitor’s social media content, top-performing posts and captions
4. Come up with your main brand’s mission ( hotel content, F&B content) and what you would like to prioritise as visual on your page
5. Do research on which is the best light for your content and the appropriate angle, size of the picture
6. Find the relevant information for taking easily the content with your smartphone (expensive cameras are not always the sole tool for taking stunning pictures)
7. Regroup all the information as a manual style
