Howdy camper! So, you’re in charge of your MSP social media. Great! Depending on your experience this may be a piece of cake or…. A bit overwhelming. In this guide, we’ll outline how to effectively grow the social presence of the MSP you work at!

Let’s get started!

First up, get a consistent schedule. This will make filling the schedule a lot easier. For instance, a schedule we use and recommend for our MSP social media looks something like this:

Monday: Share a Blog from your website
Tuesday: Video – Tuesday tech tip, Live Action Video, your own custom video. Always upload natively to the platform. You don’t want to include a video link. For instance, do not include a YouTube link on your Facebook posts. Upload it to Facebook (using a scheduler. More below)
Wednesday: Campaign specific post. If you are running a specific campaign, this would be a great time to post a funny, entertaining, or informative piece from the campaign. If you’re not running a campaign, including a service spotlight that isn’t sales but teaches them something new about a service they may or may not already be using.
Thursday: Throwback Thursday: Our target market LOVES nostalgia. Remind them of dial-up internet or old-school computers. Something that will connect them to your brand by tapping into their emotion.
Friday: Humor post. Be funny! Either share from a different page, come up with something original or pull from our humor pack at MSP Camp.

The point of the schedule is to be consistent with your social posting. You can fill up your posts for the next 3 months in less than a week! However, without a schedule, you will likely be stuck in paralysis by analysis wondering what to post and wanting it to be AMAZING, instead of getting quality consistently posted. I know this because that’s exactly what happened to me when I started 😊

This is just an example schedule. Feel free to create your unique schedule, or stick to this one at first.

How to schedule

There are tons of great tools to post on social media. Some of the big contenders are Hootsuite and Publer.

We personally love Publer. It’s easy to use and you can easily “repost” previous content that performed well which should tie into your strategy. More on that later.

Most of these tools have “recommended post times” after you’ve been using the tool for a while. Make sure to take advantage of this! It will help you to continuously engage your audience.

Make sure you are also posting on key employees’ LinkedIn as well (Owner, Vice President, Business Development). LinkedIn promotes “thought leaders” and actively inhibits company pages. So the strategy there does need to be tailored towards individuals. You still want to post on the company pages, but also include individuals in the LinkedIn posting (with their permission). Ensure to tailor the text to match their style if possible.

What platforms should you use?

For a top-notch MSP social media, we put all of our effort into Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google Listing. That’s not to say you can’t try other platforms, but it all comes down to where is your target market.

Most of our target market at the time of writing this is on Facebook and LinkedIn. They don’t really hang out on Instagram or TikTok, so we don’t put effort in that direction.

However, that could change, and your target market may differ from the target market of our MSP. So, this is not a strict recommendation, just a guideline.

Expanding your reach

Okay, so now you have a good schedule in place and an easy mechanism for getting that schedule out to all your social media platforms. Great! And you post. And you post. And you post. Engagement is going up, but you’re not really adding many new subscribers. What’s the deal?

When it comes to organic MSP social media, posting is how you reach your current audience, but you’ll have to think outside the box to expand that audience and overall reach. Excellent content helps that goal, but you cannot rely on it completely. So, how do you expand your reach?

Do not purchase likes or subscribers – I have seen businesses fall into this trap. When someone likes your page that’s not actually engaged with your page, it oftentimes inhibits your reach to the people who DO care.
Competitions – I’ve tried this. Competitions to get people to like your page for a reward tend to bring in people who can care less about your company and are generally pretty cheap, so even though I used to recommend this, I have found it to be less and less effective over the years.

What to do:

Encourage your clients to like your pages. This is a big one. Encourage them in your newsletters and feel free to do a competition specifically for your CLIENTS. Not the public. The more clients that like your page the better!!!
Have the business owner(s) invite their connections to like the page. Oftentimes business owners know business owners. This will expand your reach and you’ll start to notice more referrals from “word of mouth.” It’s interesting, when you start marketing more, all of a sudden referrals pick up too 😊 you as the coordinator may never get credit for that and that is okay. If the business is growing, you’re growing.
Get involved with local community groups. This will take the most work but will likely have the largest impact. Let’s go over the steps to do this properly:
Prepare a list of 5-10 business-centered groups in your city. This should not be focused on technology: it should be a community where businesspeople congregate. I can almost guarantee there are multiple groups like this in your city. If not, look at surrounding cities as well.
Review the rules in each group to identify what you can post in the group. Oftentimes, if you’re sharing helpful tips, infographics, or informative videos that are not positioned to sell, you won’t have much of an issue
Depending on how active the group is, decide how often you will be posting in each group and set a checklist or calendar invite for yourself, so you stay consistent!! Consistency is key.
Stay consistent and eventually you will become a resource for that community, and they will recognize you (or the owner’s account you may be using to post these) and the MSP.
Share your clients’ posts. If you have clients that do well on social media, make sure to share their content on your own social media! Give them a shout-out and help them expand their own reach! Even if they don’t share your content, it shows your MSP is community-focused and will help to expand your own reach.
Use relevant hashtags. Hashtags are still effective, so make sure you continuously refine what hashtags you’re using on each post. Tip: Don’t use MSP or other hashtags that… only MSPs would care about!
B2B Influencers – We have a whole guide on this point because it’s been very helpful for our MSP. When you complete a cable job, large migration, or help a client with moving into their new building, ask them if they would be willing to give your MSP a shout-out on their social media! They won’t do it unless you ask but it’s very likely they will if you do! Check out the full guide for more information on this point.
Engage your followers – Make sure to poll followers. Respond to their comments. Encourage the behavior! Simple tip but often missed.
Advertising – It’s inexpensive to advertise on most social media platforms. Oftentimes, you can select specific demographics. If you know your marketing persona/avatar well, this makes advertising very easy! Consistently update the advertising with each new campaign and include a variety of content such as humorous videos, checklists, webinar invites, and carousel images. This will keep your content “fresh” and engage your target market.
Enhance your videos with captions and loading bars – this simple trick has really helped to expand our reach. These elements hold the attention of the viewer and show the algorithm that your videos are worth watching! You can easily do this inexpensively with tools such as Veed.io.
Encourage team members to get engaged with your social media. We have received leads from team members sharing our content!

Other content to post outside of the schedule

Wow! That was a lot, but don’t worry, you got this. Now you have a great schedule, your content is consistently scheduled out weeks ahead of time, and you’re engaging your community, and expanding your reach! You’re on a roll. Now what?

As you get more comfortable managing your MSP social media, you’ll start to get more creative and try new things. This is a good thing! Social media is a great place to experiment. Don’t worry about being all super professional and boring. We even get silly on LinkedIn and it works wonders.

So, after you have a consistent schedule working, start adding other content to the mix and test how your audience reacts. Some examples outside of the schedule you may want to post on your MSP social media:

Employee spotlights
Client spotlights
Holiday posts – make sure these stand out. Need help with this? Go download the MSP Camp holiday pack and you’ll be ahead of 99% of the other MSPs on this
Company updates – what cool awards, announcements, or changes are happening at your business? Your audience does care about this. So, make sure to post it! We received one of our largest clients when a team member shared our post about our new office inside of a state-of-the-art data center. If we never posted that, he would not have shared that, and that word-of-mouth “referral” would have never happened. That’s how marketing helps promote referrals. Again, you may not get credit for this and that is OKAY because you will be driving your own “direct” ROI from consistently marketing the MSP.
Funny stuff! I know we have a humor day on a Friday but make a short video that’s funny. Make a custom cartoon or meme that pokes fun at the challenges most businesses have with IT. Something to stand out.
Share customer testimonials – This is great content! Check out our testimonial template on our template page to get started with this. When a customer leaves that glowing review on Google or through the survey sent out by your PSA, paste that into a nice-looking template and schedule out!
Do you have an event or webinar coming up? Be generous about posting about it! Even if you don’t get a lot of “likes” check on that reach each time. You’ll find that dozens if not hundreds of unique people are seeing those posts. And many of them are considering registering. Remind them!
Behind the scenes – Show behind the scenes of projects you’re working on! Before and after infrastructure projects are always a hit 😊
The content that performs best on your social media can be shared again every 90 days! There is no penalty for this and will increase your engagement over time.

Conclusion

Congratulations camper! You’ve just improved yourself and your MSP social media and now have a guide to go back to when you need MSP-specific inspiration and structure for your position (or at least one part of your position).

If you learned something from this and believe it’s valuable, I just have one thing to ask. As you get more comfortable in your position, you’ll find your own way of doing things and I have no doubt will continue to improve in your career. If you find something that works well that is not included in this guide, please let us know 😊

Just send us a chat, email, or call with your own tips or suggestions and we’ll update this blog so all members can benefit.

Thanks again and we’ll see you around camp!

Our 5 Tips For Top-Notch MSP Social Media

Table of Contents

Creating a schedule for your MSP Social Media