Article by:
Digital Marketing Institute (https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/)
Small businesses around the world know that social media is here to stay. You only need to look at the social media demographics across platforms to know that! But that doesn’t mean you have had the chance to put in the time or effort necessary to cultivate a good presence on the right networks.
Even if you haven’t optimized your social media presence, there’s still time, and the benefits will be worth the effort. There are many advantages to cultivating your brand on social media. It can help improve your brand’s social customer service, allow you to communicate with customers and prospects on a new level, help engage and reach new audiences, build authority, and drive traffic to your website.
In short, creating a practical social media strategy can drive growth for your small business by fostering lasting and loyal relationships with prospects and customers. To ensure your brand’s presence on social media is managed with quality and consistency, use a social media style guide to keep track of the many different elements.
1. Choose the Right Networks
Social media has exploded since Facebook went public back in 2012, and there are thousands of networks dedicated to anything from connecting old classmates to social activism.
So with all these options, how does a business pick the right ones? The advice from most experts is to join the most popular, and choosing the right ones comes down to your audience and your goals. Here’s some information to help get you started:
- Facebook: the most prominent platform, has 2.89 billion active monthly users, and the site is ideal for businesses that want to generate leads and build relationships.
- LinkedIn: the platform for business networking can be used by both B2B and B2C businesses to create trust, build authority, and engage audiences.
- Twitter: whose platform is immediacy, is perfect for businesses whose major audience is under 50 and who need to stay on top of time-sensitive information like breaking news, announcements, and trending topics.
- Pinterest: the photo-sharing site is a fantastic platform for businesses with visual appeal (think restaurants, fashion, art, travel, and weddings). It’s more for social discovery than social networking and is excellent for driving sales because so many users look to the site to plan purchases.
- Snapchat: the expiring-content platform is one of the fastest growing social networking sites despite rumors of the parent company Snap being in trouble a few years ago. Businesses can leverage Snapchat by offering promotions, personalized content, exclusive access, and building relationships with influencers to drive brand recognition and loyalty.
- Instagram: Instagram was so successful that just 2 years after launching, it was bought by Facebook in 2012. Its success is rooted in staying true to its original goal – allowing users to post photos and videos from their mobile. The creation of Instagram Stories (an idea stolen from Snapchat!) featuring content that expires in 24 hours has enabled it to amass nearly 1 billion global users.
- TikTok: A phenomenon in the social media world, TikTok is a force to be reckoned with, seeing rapid growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the first app not owned by Facebook to have reached 3 billion installs due to its popularity amongst influencers and celebrities. The usability of the platform, huge music directory, and unique filters attract an engaged younger demographic.
2. Set a Goal
Being active on social media has many benefits for your business, and there are many things you can accomplish with a social presence. This includes performing customer service, engaging customers, generating leads, expanding your audience, driving sales, increasing web traffic, gaining valuable insights and feedback, and much more.
But to achieve these with any measure of success, you must have a goal to work towards because you’ll need to take steps to create a social media strategy and get there. Your techniques for driving sales, for instance, will be different from your approach to improve your customer service offering. So it’s important to know what you want to accomplish.
3. Come up with a Strategy
Having a goal for improving your social media presence is great, but it’s only the beginning. Once you know what you want to achieve, you have to come up with a plan to get there.
Start by designating the person or people who will be part of the social media team and break up their roles and responsibilities, so everybody knows what’s expected and when.
You should also decide on your posting frequency and create a content calendar that will help you plan posts and don’t miss days. This approach to scheduling is a big part of your strategy, and there are great social media calendar templates you can use that lay out:
- Who your audience is
- What topics and subjects your audience is interested in
- The usable content you already have
- What kind of content do you still need to create or curate
- When and on what platforms content will be published
The most effective way to develop a strategy for your business is to learn from the best. Consider a social media and marketing course that focuses on social research and social strategy, so you find your audience and know how to engage them.
4. Make a Content Creation or Curation Plan with Your Audience in Mind
Knowing your audience is critical when it comes to finding success with social media engagement. This is because the interests and needs of your audience will determine the type of content you should share and the way you engage your followers.
For instance, if you’re a coffee roastery, your target audience might be interested in recipes for fancy coffee drinks, brewing tips and techniques, and other Java-related articles. Some of the crucial things you should know about your audience include age, location, gender, goals, likes, needs, behaviors, challenges, and pain points.
No matter who your audience is, the content you share should always be high quality and relevant. You should investigate the popular content types and prioritize video, images, and other visual content as often as possible because all demographics and audiences favor these.
5. Select Tools to Schedule and Automate Posts
Staying active and present on social media takes time and dedication. But there are plenty of automation tools available to content creators to automatically publish and schedule posts up to a month in advance.
These tools, which include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, MeetEdgar, and BuzzSumo, can save you time by allowing you to plan and schedule batches of posts at once. They also make monitoring your networks easier and responding to messages quickly.
6. Actively Engage Your Audience in Relevant Ways
Although content is significant on social media, it’s not enough to just post your content and walk away. You have to create content that excites and entertains to connect and drive engagement. That way, you can foster the relationships you want to build and gain the trust of your audience.
There are many ways you can engage with your audiences:
- Comment on posts
- Start and participate in conversations
- Share relevant information
- Share user-generated content (UGC)
- Ask and answer questions
- Post polls and follow up with the results
- Address complaints and criticisms
- Show appreciation for customers
7. Minimize the Time You Spend Promoting
Although social selling to increase sales is becoming increasingly popular among salespeople and marketers, the process of using social networks to drive growth is different from what most people are used to.
Rather than using social as an active promotional platform, it’s best to use it as a tool for engagement and communication.
In fact, it’s recommended that businesses follow the 80/20 rule and keep their promotional content to 20%. The lion’s share of content should be dedicated to meeting the needs of your audience.
8. Maintain a Constant Presence & Brand Voice
Social media isn’t a one-and-done deal. It takes time and patience to cultivate a reliable presence.
An ideal platform for brand building and recognition, it’s crucial that every post is in line with your brand and image. This can become difficult if you have multiple people assigned to social media because everybody will bring their personality to their posts. For this reason, it’s best to limit the number of people responsible for posting and make sure everyone knows the voice and image you want to present.
When it comes to posting, automation tools used effectively can save you a lot of time and ensure your presence on your networks even when you’re not! With the right tools, you can minimize the time you have to dedicate to social media, but it will still require at least 15 minutes a day to monitor your channels and respond to questions.
In terms of posting frequency, the right number really depends on the platform you’re using. For LinkedIn and Facebook, don’t post more than once a day, and limit posts to five times a week. On the other hand, Twitter changes so quickly that the more you post, the better. With Pinterest, 11 pins a day seems to be the magic number, while Instagram audiences seem to like 1-2 posts a day.
9. Watch the Right Metrics to Monitor Your Progress
Social media use is growing all the time, and every month there are more active users than before, especially on popular networks. It’s not necessary to have a presence on every social platform. It’s a much better strategy to define your goals, locate your audience, and pick the right networks for you based on those factors.
Your brand capabilities and social media goals will determine the metrics that matter, and it’s essential to measure these to ensure you’re on the right track. For instance, if you want to increase site traffic, pay attention to the amount of referral traffic coming from social.
You can rely on many resources for metrics, including Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and page insights, Sprout Social, LinkedIn company pages report, Keyhole, Twitter analytics and keyword reports, Buffer, and BuzzSumo.
10. Keep learning by enrolling in a social media and marketing course
The key to mastering social media is to understand how to find and engage your audience and how each platform works. A great way to do this is to take the time to enroll in a social media and marketing course that will teach you everything you need to know to drive business success.