Grow your site with Social Media
Establishing a brand on social media is an integral part of business marketing. Unfortunately, there are thousands more just sitting there doing nothing for every brand pulling in business and killing the social media game. There’s a lot more to social media than posting a few links to your website now and then or mentioning a few people before signing off.
A strong and active social media strategy is vital to your brand-building success. But what do you have to do to build a social media account like Wendy’s or GoPro’s? You need a considerable budget to reach the number of people that these accounts are going. So keep your feet on the ground. While you’re just getting established, you might not have the budget for that. You can, however, use some of the same strategies they use to grow your following and build your brand online.
1. Set goals the way scientists do. That is, make them measurable, realistically achievable, relevant for your business, and constrained by time. For example, find out which social media channel gets you the best engagement, track your metrics using a social dashboard, set achievable and relevant goals, and set a time limit to achieve them.
2. Learn about your audience. There’s an amalgam of data about social media followers available through each platform. However, not everyone is your audience. Figure out the type of people that want your product. Then, target your brand to reach those people. Given time and research, you’ll figure out how often to post for your audience and the type of content that they like. Pander to them.
3. Be relatable. There’s nothing worse than a corporate stiff on social media. Nobody likes to connect with accounts like that. So loosen up and let your personality shine. Social media isn’t a board room. People want a transparent business representative to joke and connect in a way that isn’t socially embarrassing.
4. Learn and use relationship-building techniques. Having 100 followers who regularly interact with you and your content is far more valuable to your business than 10,000 people who follow and never revisit your page. Don’t forget to tag people when you respond to them. Ask leading questions and answer the questions your followers have. Respond to comments when you are tagged in them. Liking other pages’ content and sharing it isn’t enough.
5. You need a posting schedule. There’s a good reason that significant brands post on a plan. More people see platform algorithms like accounts that post regularly and their content. You can use several tools to pre-schedule posts to several platforms at once. The pre-scheduled posts are released automatically. Write them in advance, customize them to each forum, upload them to whichever tool you use and set the schedule for your post.
6. Never use autoresponders on social media. That’s an excellent way to turn off followers and potential customers.
7. Social media for your business is an extension of customer service, not sales. It would help if you had people who are good with public relations, not hard selling. You can post about your promotions and whatnot, but the most critical aspect of society is responding to customers.
8. Don’t forget to optimize your content. It should mention a few of your top keywords in posts and within the profile information, but you shouldn’t keyword stuff your content as a rule. Also, don’t forget to optimize images, which tell algorithms that you’re a pro, and they should show your content to more people.
9. Visuals are much more successful on social media than content. The majority of people don’t like to read. Remember that when setting up your profile and posting content. Images attached to posts should be very high quality and relevant to the topic.
10. Make sure you let everyone know you’re on social media. Link it on your webpage, put it in your emails, write it on your branded gear, and find every way you can to get your existing customers to follow you on social media.
11. Piggyback on trends. Share content that’s relevant to your brand and that your followers want to see. For example, make posts about trending topics or share other pages’ content.
12. Don’t forget that social media isn’t the free place to market your business that it was initially. At some point, you’re going to need to pay for a few advertisements to pull in a bigger audience. Paid sponsorships by major influencers are also an option.
If you can get social media down to an art, the ROI is incredibly high. Don’t forget that building an audience takes time, and don’t give up too soon. Use as many tools as you need to figure out what works best, and you’ll grow your page into the business opportunity it should be.