Affiliate Articles

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

This article covers a quick fly-by overview of social media. The platforms we’ll be looking at today are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We’re going to look at these particular topics:

• Main audience/users of each (age)

• Type of content on each

• How to set up a page/profile

• Best practices/tips and tricks

Audience Usage

In using social media, it’s important to keep in mind your audience.

Facebook: Those using Facebook are adults, mostly aged 35 and up. Users have expressed privacy protection standards being an issue, so there is a certain level of distrust with this platform. Facebook serves as a news platform, for many people, more than just a place to connect with friends. Ads get a wide reach.

Instagram: Mostly young people between the ages of 16-34 use Instagram. Video content is a huge part of connecting on Instagram, including short-form videos called reels used for information and humor. Whereas Facebook is a news platform, positivity and transparency are more important to the Instagram audience.

Twitter: Twitter is a bit of an outlier as far as advertising goes. Its users are majority men (70%), college grads with higher income. This creates a space centered around news and world events. Because tweets are so short, there is an extremely brief window to capture people's attention, but this makes ads effective.

Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta, which you may or may not have heard. They function well side-by-side, and you can create and schedule posts and ads through a business account management profile. If you have questions about this, you can contact our digital marketer at seth@equip-bid.com.

setting up a profile

If you don’t have a Facebook or Instagram profile for your business, we highly suggest you set them up! This is a great way to form a presence in your community and get extra eyes on your auctions. I’ll quickly walk you through how to do this.

We’ll start with Facebook. There are profiles, pages, and groups. Please note, you have to create a profile first to start a page or group, but it’s as easy as registering for any other account by visiting Facebook.com or downloading the app! You can’t create a profile for your business—Facebook ensures that profiles belong to real people.

Once you’ve created a profile, I would suggest making a Page specific to your business. Anyone that has a profile can help manage your page, so you can have more than one person helping to post. If people “like” or “follow” your Page, they’ll see the updates you post like any other person on their homepage feed.

To make a Page, go to www.facebook.com/pages/create. Click to choose a Category—you can type in auction and pick one of their suggestions—then write a brief description. Click Create Page, and voila! Add your logo as your profile picture by uploading the file, and maybe a graphic as your cover photo that quickly tells people about your business. You can add all sorts of information here like where you’re located, photos of the types of auctions you do, and so on. You can invite your Facebook friends to like and follow your page!

Groups are a good thing to join as they are a place for shared interests, sales, events, etc., so see if you can find some that specialize in what you sell! Then you’re able to share in these groups about your auctions.

Instagram

So, what about Instagram? I suggest using the mobile app, as this is the main way users interact with Instagram content and is much more user-friendly than the desktop version.

You can create a profile just for a business, so you don’t have to have a particular person tied to the account. You just make a Business Account which gives you different features for reaching your audience, and you’re off to the races.

All of these social platforms are competing with one another for the newest, shiniest features, so there’s a lot to keep up with, but it also provides a lot of opportunity to reach people where they are! On Instagram and Facebook, you have feeds which show posts—this can be videos, images, text, and so on—you have stories, which is content that only lasts 24 hours, and you have Instagram reels, which are short videos. Play around with what you have the time and capacity to create for your business, but each of these can attract different types of viewers (and hopefully buyers!).

AUTOMATIC TWEETS

Our developers have created a cool feature on Twitter where you can set up equipbid.biz to automatically send a feed of your auctions to a Twitter page! Create a Twitter account—you can do this on twitter.com—and navigate to equipbid.biz. Our admin view is probably different from the affiliate view, so if you’re interested, please give me a call and we can work together to get you set up. How it works, though, is that you just connect your affiliate profile to your Twitter account, and your auction title and date will be added to a post with your featured item photos.

Twitter is fast-paced, just like the auction industry, so if you gather a following, it could be a benefit to you!

ADVERTISING

Equip-Bid has all three of these types of accounts, but we could always use improvement! We have invested in Facebook ads, are working on growing our Instagram audience, and rely on automatic tweets at the moment. But there is so much more possibility for us to explore, and we will be working on that in coming months and the rest of the year.

The internet, it goes without saying, is huge. So we will never saturate the market. Social media is a big deal, though; it’s a full-time job, and we recognize how busy you already are, but every little bit of exposure helps bring new bidders to your auctions and establish your brand and vision for your company. Have grace for yourself as you start out, and just keep interacting with other pages, groups, and profiles to build awareness.

We also provide marketing on our own social channels if you have an auction you would like to promote! Fill out the form or send me an email to get started.

TAKEAWAY

As a takeaway, we are challenging all affiliates to implement one social media strategy. If you don’t have any profiles for your business, just create one. Sign up for Twitter and have equipbid.biz post tweets for you. If you want to reach a younger demographic, connect an Instagram account to your Facebook. If you’re already pretty consistent with posting, maybe try your hand at scheduling some ads to try to attract new bidders. Social media is a compounding opportunity, so we want to know what you’re implementing so we can come alongside you and boost your efforts.