In my last post, I talked about how brands, like Pandora, get us to spend more time on social media. All of the aspects I mentioned in the post are social media best practices that brands should follow. There are many other best practices, but sadly Pandora doesn’t follow them on any of their social platforms. Here’s four best practices that Pandora isn’t following so you don’t make the same mistake.
1. Engage with followers – it’ll make them stick around
When you think of a brand social media page, what comes to mind? Probably the Wendy’s of the world. Wouldn’t you rather follow a sassy brand page than one that just posts the same kind of promo all day every day? On Facebook, Pandora is terrible at engaging with their followers. Both my groupmates, Bronwyn and Danial, had mentioned the same thing in their audits of Pandora on Twitter and Instagram. By terrible at engaging I mean they don’t reply to any of their comments on any of their platforms. They also don’t promote any user generated content or retweet followers’ tweets. I can’t emphasize enough how bad this is for Pandora. Even if the comments aren’t a question, they can have fun and reply to comments with a GIF. According to Buffer, engaging lets the brand become more human to followers. It also allows comments sections to become somewhat moderated. When it comes to social media, engagement is key.
2. Create a call to action – your followers want to be heard
When you comment on a brand’s post or tweet them you want to be heard, right? So does everyone else. That’s the one of the reasons why we all use social media, to be heard. For a brand to make their followers feel like they are heard, they can create a call to action. This could be something like asking followers a question or creating a poll. This is easy on Facebook and Danial even mentioned it’s a best practice for Twitter as well. For Pandora this could be so easy because they’re a music streaming platform! They can create so many different calls to action based around music.
One way they could easily create a call to action is to ask followers what kind of music they want to see more of. According to Sprout Social, this allows them to see their audience as well as make their followers feel like they have a voice in the content posted. In addition for information gathering, the call to action can just be a fun question to get followers talking to the brand and to each other.
3. Post unique content for each platform – give a reason to follow you on multiple platforms
You log onto Facebook and see Pandora’s post. You go on Twitter a while later and see it again. A few hours later you go onto Instagram and there it is again! Right then you decide to unfollow them because who needs to see the same post three times? Posting the same content across all platforms can not only get boring but be annoying. It might even result in losing followers. As mentioned in making a call to action, the audience on each platform might be different. This means they all might be interested in different types of content as well. After looking through the group’s audits, we all agree that Pandora is posting basically the exact same thing across the board. Maybe on Facebook Pandora should be posting less pop and rap and post more rock and jazz. In addition to this, maybe the people on Twitter might what them to have more memes than generic promo posts. According to Hootsuite, seeing this information and actively using it can cause a rise in follower engagement because they are actually interested in what is posted.
4. Use hashtags – you’ll get some customer interaction
You go on Twitter and see a fun trending hashtag and make your own tweet including it. Later you find out Dairy Queen started it. On Instagram you see everyone posting pictures of the new seasonal drink with a hashtag Starbucks made for it. Bronwyn mentioned “Pandora clearly knows what these are as they have three of them on display in their [Instagram] bio (#PandoraMusic #PandoraPodcasts #PandoraLive).” On Facebook they did use both #PandoraPodcasts and #PandoraLive each once. Danial said they didn’t use any on Twitter. Sprout Social mentions how important using hashtags are for both Twitter and Instagram. Hashtags increases marketability and discoverability. They are also important when it comes to creating trends. For example, Pandora could create a dance challenge with #PandoraChallenge and have people dance to their playlists.
Be Better Than Pandora!
These four points are just the beginning of what Pandora needs to improve on. The root of all social media success is engagement and you need to know how to do it right if you want to be successful on social media. In addition to this, you need to know your audience. Who you’re tweeting to may not be the same people as you just posted that picture for on Instagram. It’s also important to get your followers involved by using a call to action or a hashtag. You’re your pages a fun place that followers want to spend time. Pandora made these mistakes so you don’t have to! Is there anything another brand is not doing that they should? Do you have any other recommendations for Pandora? Let me know in the comments!
Gia's Social Media Site 