Using social media for marketing is often more complicated than newbie marketers and business owners expect. Building an audience requires much more work than simply posting about your upcoming deals and discounts. You need to be personable while executing a well thought-out strategy, so here are a few pieces of advice for getting the most out of your social media campaign:
Use analytics to shape your campaigns
You should not approach social media with a trial-and-error attitude. Sure, you can figure out what does and doesn’t work, but you’ll waste a significant amount of time and energy attempting to figure out what your audience responds to when you could simply use social media analytics tools such as Agorapulse. These resources provide you with actionable insights into your audience and campaign performances: what your audience demographics are like, how often they are online, what kind of posts provoke the most engagement (such as video, photo, etc.), and more. When you aren’t stumbling around social media marketing while blindfolded, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Play to each platform’s strengths
Every platform is home to a different audience and includes different features, so do not approach each one the same. What you post on Facebook, for instance, may not work on LinkedIn. Many platforms are image-heavy, but your Instagram posts will evoke a different tone than those you share on Twitter.
Do not feel pressured to be on every platform, either. You’ll spread yourself too thin if you attempt to establish your business’s presence on channels where there is not an audience for you. Select the social media sites you believe will be most advantageous for you and focus your attention on those.
Interact with your audience
Your followers do not want you to be an impersonal entity that sits behind your screen while ignoring their comments and questions. It is also unfair of you to post content, no matter how much effort you put into it, and expect people to flock to it with excitement. You need to interact with your audience—respond to their comments, answer their questions, and let them know that you see and care about what they are saying. Businesses can only improve themselves with feedback, and social media is a convenient place to collect it.
Be strategic about your links and captions
Some platforms, like Instagram, only allow you to share a link in certain places (such as your bio and stories if you have over ten thousand followers, in Instagram’s case). Twitter also allows a limited number of characters, so sharing a link to your website can be challenging when you have to fit it in with your message. Fortunately, there are internet marketing URL shorteners available so that you can post your links while maximizing the character space you have left to make your point.
Keep SEO in mind
Social media signals do not directly affect your website’s search rankings, but Blue Corona notes that social media nevertheless boosts your online visibility (and therefore, traffic to your site), increases your brand authority, local SEO, and content distribution. Remember to interlink your social media channels with each other and your main page, so that people know all of them are yours and can easily recognize your brand.
Remember that almost every social media platform incorporates its own search engine, though. To maximize your brand’s discoverability, tag your content with relevant hashtags (namely, on Twitter and Instagram) so that you appear on in-platform search results. Tagging your content also helps you participate in industry conversations.
Keep your voice and frequency consistent
Wouldn’t it be annoying if you followed a brand on Twitter that posts about travel with a humorous twist, only for it to spontaneously mention sugary drinks in an overly sales-y way? Not only is it off-brand, but such posts are not what you follow them for, and you trust them not to spam you a little less now. It would also be frustrating if an account posted four times a week, every week, only for it to go silent for a few days and then try to make up for it so that it overwhelms your feed.
Be consistent with your tone of voice and how often you post. You do not want to bore your audience, but you also don’t want to give them surprises they didn’t sign up for.
Social media is an excellent way to reach people—billions of individuals are online that you would not be able to reach otherwise—but getting maximizing your campaigns’ effectiveness necessitates a thorough strategy. How do you plan to get the most out of your social media efforts?
