A bad social presence may be worse than none at all, so make sure that your accounts are managed well as it is imperative for attracting and engaging your target audience online.
Social media isn’t something that will work if it is done at irregular intervals, and off-the-cuff status updates or quick posts to encourage your most recent piece of content won’t set your profiles flaming. Instead, it needs a strategy and a lucid plan for achieving your goals to see momentous successes.
Identify your objective
Firstly, know what your social objectives are because without knowing them you will not know the standards you should set, what you should be evaluating or the calls to action you should be executing.
In spite of whether you would like to boost web traffic, improve brand awareness or just promote interaction with your company, it is essential to know the goals so you understand the purpose of your social output. Once you have figured them out you can create your social platforms and plans aligned with your aims.
Choose your platforms
The most significant thing is not to stretch yourself too much. It can be appealing to open a profile on each social network available, but doing this will, without a doubt, leave you with a few active pages while others will lay inactive. Focus only on the platforms that you know your audience majorly use – for example, Instagram is an amazing platform for art showplace and boutique, but it wouldn’t inevitably work for a scientific lab or a doctor’s surgery. Remember to keep your branding persistent – your page headers, bios and profile pictures should be professional, informative and visually delighting.
Do your research
Another solution to efficiently use social media for marketing is to basically recognize the platform you are on and how your audiences make use it. Take some time to gain some insight into it – finding out the complexities of the platforms. This will help you to make navigation on it easier and so that you can use it to the fullest. Knowing at what time your audience is online and scheduling your posts accordingly will help make your brand more noticeable for people – which will increase interactions and customer engagement. Moreover, use Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and other powerful tools to examine and then experiment to learn what works best for you.
Decide your tone
After you have known your target market and what you have to achieve – now you should know which voice to use. This should be comparatively simple. Your target market demographics, offline marketing, and the business domain you belong to should give you a fairly good idea of how best you can communicate. A cake shop would interact with its consumers in an informal and friendly tone; on the other hand, an advertising agency would use a professional and more formal language. This should be maintained across all surfaces of the business – constancy is indispensable for brand awareness.
A great example of a company is Ferns and Petals that has a detailed understanding of its brand and the tone that works effectively on social media.
Utilize social opportunities
Social media offers companies infinite opportunities to get engaged in conversations, build relationships with customers and get on hashtags to avail a brand edge. The recent US news Panama papers, revolving around various social media streams about the big names included in this million-dollar news: approximately 1.15 million tweets on Twitter, 2900 comments on Reddit in 13hr and 4 lakh views on YouTube. Loads of companies decided to take a chance and ‘hash-jack’ this event, including #politics, #information, and #secret.
Using social media in this manner supports to present current news and can lead to an amazingly high response. Furthermore, Twitter lately introduced a Moments tab, Facebook is constantly showing what is newly trending, and the growth of live-streaming apps like Youtube shows no sign of slowing.
Calls to action (CTA)
Unless you are Adidas, Apple, or Barack Obama, engagement doesn’t automatically take place – you need to create it, and the trick is not to kindle it often. Arrange your posts properly to improve your probability, with any CTA positioned at the end.
Promote interactions by asking for the viewpoints or, as recommended by Twitter, hosting competitions where you specially request participants to retweet or follow your page as a means of entry. Incentives are a big help in this regard – a lot of people will follow, share, and retweet if there is a reward on offer for doing so.
Let’s use visual
Visually appealing posts are vital – they are means of stimulating engagement and, according to Buffer, cause increased clicks, favourites, and retweets. Making use of images across all of your social platforms will make your feeds more eye-catching, which means greater reach, more followers, and more possibility of engagement. This is also a fact that video content also is gaining popularity day by day.
According to a report by Cisco,” By 2019, there will be around a million minutes of video shared each second.” This is a colossal opportunity that you cannot think of missing out on! To begin including video into your strategies and make video content that your target audience will love and share.
Points to keep in mind:
- Make use of your time wisely – only put effort where your audience exists
- Carry out detailed research of social platforms and know-how your target audience is utilizing them
- Stay on the peak of trends – spend time online gaining insights on what people are talking about
- Don’t overlook your monthly stats – know why they are good/bad and learn from that
