One of the first tasks I was assigned to when I joined NEUROPUBLIC back in 2016 was to take over its social media accounts; back then, the company had two almost inactive accounts on Facebook and LinkedIn, respectively.
I came from Agroknow, where I was responsible (among others) for its social media on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram - and it was commonly admitted that I did a pretty good job. Frequent updates, interesting news, good use of handles and hashtags and attractive visuals was a part of the magic.
So I had the experience, know-how and all the good will to replicate my approach in the case of NEUROPUBLIC. The context was slightly different (information systems and smart farming in this case) and the responsibility was higher (being responsible for the social media presence of a company of 100+ employees) but I rolled up my sleeves and started working on it.
Rolling up my sleeves
The first thing I did was to define the areas of interest. Then to find out who the major players were and what reliable sources of relevant content I could use. I started following collaborators, projects and other stakeholders of NEUROPUBLIC, with a segment of them following us back.
I am especially proud of NEUROPUBLIC's Twitter account. Twitter is the platform I love the most, because of its really fast feed, option to add visuals to an otherwise boring text and the substantial use of hashtags. Plus, I love the strict character limitation of each tweet, which makes everyone think twice before posting a long text.
Right now,
NEUROPUBLIC's Twitter account has
more than 1,200 real followers, all of them organic (i.e. we used no budget for paid posts, Twitter campaigns etc. yet). At the same time, the company's
LinkedIn page has reached
2,800 followers, making it our most popular social media channel. We used LinkedIn for posting paid job postings, and we noticed a slight increase in the number of followers after each posting.
In both channels, the majority of the content is published in English.
Using Facebook for business purposes & the competitive advantage of LinkedIn and Twitter
On the other hand,
NEUROPUBLIC's Facebook page has about
1,600 followers. And we had some paid campaigns running in the past, which increased our reach and brought in some new followers. One might expect more from the more popular social media platform - I didn't.
First, our Facebook content is exclusively available in Greek. No matter what the status of the company is in Greece, the audience is much smaller compared to the global one. The vast majority of our projects are EU-funded ones, our larger networks are global and NEUROPUBLIC's
gaiasense smart farming system gets a lot of attention from international bodies. Automatic translation of posts has been available for quite a long time now, but it is not the same.
Second, our main audience does not use Facebook for professional purposes. I knew it before - LinkedIn and Twitter are much more appropriate for such purposes. If you asked me, I would say that most companies use Twitter and LinkedIn (in this order) for interacting for professional purposes, while for professionals / individuals LinkedIn is #1.
And you know why? Because a company cannot interact using a LinkedIn company page! You can surely post things but you cannot like a specific post as a company unless (a) it comes in your feed through a notification based on the just three hashtags you define in the page, or (b) the post explicitly mentions your company page using a tag.
As a result, if you want to be active on social media, respond, like other posts etc., then Twitter is your valuable tool. And this is what I am doing with NEUROPUBLIC's accounts.
On the other hand, as an individual you can use Twitter and LinkedIn for interacting with posts of others with no problem. And this is what I am doing with my personal accounts.
Take home messages
We post almost equally on all three channels, with small revisions in some cases. Thanks to the faster pace of Twitter, I am able to post more frequently there and this is really important in the case of our EU (and Greek) projects that I need to communicate every now and then.
On the other hand, we keep a slower pace on Facebook and LinkedIn, in order to provide our followers with more time to go through each post before going to the next one. This is not a problem, as we usually need some time to curate new posts (longer ones compared to the short tweets!) and make them as effective as possible.
In all cases, we do not pay much attention to the analytics and metrics of each channel. We still enjoy a degree of freedom in this sense, so we post things we like, when we like (or have the time to do so). We are not "selling" stuff through our social media - we just raise awareness about the company and its work, so we are not stressed (yet) about KPIs. And this is what I love the most.
So if I were to summarize, I would suggest a K.I.S.S. approach (
Keep It Stupid Simple), putting the focus on quality content and not on KPIs. In this way, we manage to establish a constantly growing community of followers on social media while at the same time having fun.
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