In these digital times when more than 3 billion people across the world use social media each month, there’s no doubt that this trend is one of the most efficient tools for growing your business. Nevertheless, there are many businesses out there that still haven’t managed to put in the effort or time necessary to build a proper social media presence. If you’re among those, now is the time to fully optimize your social media presence and reap the growth benefits that are undoubtedly worth the effort.
Importance & Influence
The advantages of cultivating your brand on social media are almost endless. Since nearly half of the world’s population is using them, social media platforms are the most natural way to connect with customers. But the importance of social media is not only about making connections – the ads and posts are a crucial part of driving traffic, making those connections actionable. At the same time, it makes those connections sustainable since it allows you to communicate with your prospects and customers on a higher level and therefore serve them better. When you look at how some pretty simple social marketing campaigns made people stop and pay attention, there’s no arguing that the influence of social media on modern consumers is huge. So let’s see how you can leverage that influence to grow your business.
Think Beyond Popular
Since 2012, when Facebook went public, there’s been an explosion in the social media world that gave birth to thousands of networks. This created numerous opportunities, but also a troublesome question – which ones are the right ones for you and your business? People mostly go for the most popular ones, but you need to think beyond that. Your choices need to have two main considerations – your goals and your target audience. Then you can filter things out and decide whether you’re in need of Facebook’s ability to build relationships and generate leads, LinkedIn’s ability to build authority and create trust, Twitter’s ability for immediacy, Pinterest’s ability to drive sales through visual appeal, etc.
Define Your Goal so You Can Maintain The Strategy
We’ve already mentioned that there’s no limit to the things you can accomplish with an active social media presence – increase your traffic, drive sales, generate leads, engage customers, expand the audience, etc. But in order to be successful in any of these things, first, you need to have a clear goal in mind. It is a foundation of your own strategy that you need to maintain. If your goal is to improve customer service than your approach will be quite different from the approach to driving sales.
Marketing strategy is a planning phase that comes after you pinpoint what you want to achieve. In order to maintain it, you need to assign people to your social media team, breaking down their responsibilities and roles clearly and accordingly to your main goal. The nature of that goal will help you decide on the type of content and posting frequency.
Know Your Audience
No matter how clear your goal is, you’ll never get the most out of your marketing strategy without knowing your audience. Their engagement always depends on their needs and interests, so you’ll need to know all about those to determine the best approach and type of content to share. Just posting content, no matter how high-quality, is not enough. Actually, without proper engagement and connections, content is worthless. You need to gain their trust and foster the relationship, meaning you need to pose and answer questions, start and maintain conversations, reply to their comments, address their criticism and complaints, etc. In order to achieve this, you need to know a lot about your audience – from gender, age, and location, to goals, likes, and behaviors. Keep in mind that your own voice in this relationship needs to remain consistent, so make sure every interaction is in line with your image and brand.
Automatization & Limited Promotion For Consistent Presence
As it takes patience and time to cultivate a reliable social media presence, it also takes some to maintain it. Don’t be afraid to utilize the right automation tools since they’ll minimize the time you’ll need to dedicate to the platform, but keep in mind that you’ll still need to maintain conversations, respond to questions, and monitor your channels. When it comes to posting frequency, it largely depends on the chosen platforms – while Twitter posts function on ʽthe more the betterʼ principle, you should limit your Facebook or LinkedIn posts to five times per week and no more than once per day. Just don’t waste time on promotional content – keep it to 20% and leave the rest for communication and engagement. The growth is not achieved through self-promotion but through meeting the needs of your audience. Keep in mind that monitoring is also a way of maintaining a consistent presence and the metrics you need to follow are determined by your goals.
As you can see, growth has nothing to do with conquering every social network out there. It is about defining your goals and knowing your audience, so you can pick the right networks and maintain a consistent presence and develop your business accordingly. Crucially, like any endeavor worth undertaking, this process won’t happen overnight and patience and persistence will be the key to success.
