In today’s world, it has become nearly impossible to grow your business without a social media presence. Whether its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, improving your presence on social media is important to get your brand in front of more customers and increase sales.
You may already have a social media account, but are you getting enough interaction? Are you getting tons of followers each month? Is your audience loving your content? If not, its time to step up your game and follow the below tips to improve your presence on social media:
1: Set your goals
The first step to improve your social media presence is to identify your goals. You need to make sure about what you want your platform to do, like raise brand awareness, increase sales, or improve public opinion.
Also, keep in mind another factor: Time. As a businessperson, you know that time is money. Putting a good time in your work can not only achieve higher ROI [return on investment] but also good ROTI [return on time invested].
The goals and objectives must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. By setting your objectives, you will know if you’re moving in the right direction or not and will also be able to test whether you have met your goals. So ensure that you reassess your goals to be more achievable or intensive.
2. Identify your audience and channels
Before strategizing, spend some time looking at your audiences’ persona, understanding their behavior, and challenges. Your efforts should be towards people who might be interested in your brand to increase Social Media Presence.
Once you’ve identified your audience, break them down to figure out:
- Social media sites they’re active on
- The interests they hold
- Their behavioral pattern
You don’t have to be on every social media platform to grow your presence. Choose networks that make sense to you, your brand, and the ones most popular among the audience. Here’s some information that’ll guide you through which platform to choose:
- Facebook- Suitable for businesses that want to generate leads and build relationships
- LinkedIn- Best for B2C & B2B businesses. Helps build trust and engage with the audience.
- Twitter- Ideal for businesses whose major audience is under 50 and who need notifications of time-sensitive information
- Pinterest- Great for driving sales using visual appeal
- Instagram- Helps build a relationship with the audience, sell to a larger niche, provide personalized content
3. Develop a strategy
A strategy is crucial to implement your goals and objectives. You need to come up with a plan to ensure that each platform serves a purpose. How to start with it? Plan a marketing calendar. Add all of your upcoming events, blog posts, and everything else essential for your business. Also, include the frequency of your posts.
This content/ marketing calendar is a huge aspect of your strategy, as it will help you layout:
- Your audience
- Topics they’re interested in
- The usable content you already have
- The content you still need to create
Once your brand develops a strategy, you’ll be able to boost the level of engagement from your audience, increase Social Media Presence, brand awareness, and improve the quantity and quality of conversions.
4. Engage with your audience
Although content is essential for social media, it’s not enough. When you’re posting, talk to your audience, and engage with them. It means, when someone posts something, reply to them. Let them know that you’re reading and also listening to their needs.
Engaging with your audience will help you build a relationship and gain trust in your audience. It may also drive traffic and increase your SEO ranking. Don’t forget; this will surely improve your social media presence.
Some ways you can engage with your audience are:
- Commenting on posts
- Starting and joining in conversations
- Sharing relevant and user-generated
- Information
- Addressing complaints
- Showing appreciation to customers
- Create a custom hashtag and ask the audience to use it to ask questions
5. Be human
One of the biggest mistakes on Social Media Presence is to appear as a faceless person with no personality. It means your brand needs to show off the person behind your social feeds. Whether they’re office photos, shots of your team, behind the scenes, getting personal with your followers helps you build connections on a personal level.
Be sure to showcase an actual personality so that the audience doesn’t have a tough time connecting with you.
6. Focus on helping rather than selling
Only a few people will engage with your brand out of love. All they want is satisfaction and benefits from your product or services. So, the best way to appease them is by answering their queries and complaints. If they ask something, respond on time. By offering solutions to their problems, you’re proving that your brand is an authority and probably earning a lifelong customer.
Your social media presence should not be about ‘hard sell’. If you’re an e-commerce business, it makes sense to push offers and deals to your audience. But more important than that would be to help them out.
If a mass of people is facing a particular problem, curate content that speaks directly to it.
If your current posts are all about you, adopt the 80/20 rule. 80% of your posts should inform and educate the audience, and 20% should promote your business.
How can you lend your audience with relevant content and improve your presence? Depending on your field, provide them with links, articles, tips, quotes, blogs, suggestions, relevant news, trending topics, and all the other information they will benefit from.
7. Automate the right way
Staying active on social media takes time and dedication, but there is an option to schedule your posts using some automation tools. These tools will automatically publish posts and schedule posts up to a month in advance.
Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer are some tools that can save your time by planning and scheduling your posts at once. They also make it easy to monitor your networks and respond to messages quickly.
Automation works best for small teams who have a lot of multitasking to do. It becomes their lifesaver as it reduces stress, keeps social activities in check, and makes you more efficient.
However, relying on only automation tools can be risky. It’s important for you to remind your audience that there is a genuine person behind your accounts. Don’t deal with it like it’s a sale and forget it job, it’s about automating, and engaging with them simultaneously.
8. Optimize your account
Social Media Optimisation [SMO] is the use of relevant keywords to attract potential customers and also rank better in the SERP. Think of what the customers are looking for on Google or other search engines and use those keywords in your posts.
You need to provide the right information using the right keywords. How can that be possible? All you need to do is add the business information, provide a link to your website in a description box, incorporate targeted keywords, share visual content, and a custom-made hashtag for customers to reach out to you.
A quick guide to optimize your social media presence:
- Adding relevant keywords to your profile
- Share content related information using the right keywords
- Add hashtags related to your brand and industry in your posts
- Connect with popular accounts in your industry for additional exposure
9. Visual Content
Nowadays, people are more inclined towards ‘show’ than ‘tell’. It means users connect and engage with visual content way more than textual content.
Getting visual doesn’t mean you need a lot of equipment or budget, consider imageries like:
- Pictures of you and your brand
- Office and team photos
- Event pictures
- Behind the scenes photos and videos
- Customers’ photos and review videos
- Infographics
Design tools like Canva can help you curate visual content, creating the most engagement from your audience. So, ensure you use it the right way.
Also, don’t forget to add captions to your post as it provides value to your audience. If creating captions is not your cup of tea, take the help of experts [professional writers].
10. Stay active
It takes time and patience to grow your presence on social media. With the right automation tools, you can schedule your posts easily, despite that, you need to take out at least 10-15 minutes of your time to monitor your channels. Responding to the customer’s queries and complaints, joining conversations, re-posting valuable content can get you ahead of the game.
Some quick tips to stay active are:
- Incorporating automation tools to save time and energy
- Repurpose content for different social media platforms
- Do not focus on too many social media platforms at once
11. Keep up with trends
Audiences relate the most to trending topics. Between breaking news, trending hashtags, latest memes, brands have the chance to include these in their content. Make sure that the trends you include are appropriate and show off your brand’s personality.
Here’s how you can use trending topics to grow your presence on social media:
- Pick trending hashtags relevant to your business.
- Go through trending pages on your social media platforms to keep yourself informed.
- Create content around new trends and also add trending hashtags to your social media post.
12. Create what people want
Understanding what the audience needs from your brand plays a huge role in growing your presence online. Knowing them is critical for finding success on social media.
You need to understand what they want to read about, what they believe in, what content they are loving, to make them your lifelong followers. Using high-quality images, videos and other types of visual content will help you stand out from your competition.
13. Promote your business
Social media isn’t free as it once was. While there is plenty that can be done organically, you may still find it difficult to grow on social media. Guess why? Promoting your business has a higher reach than any other method.
You can either promote by paying for ads or hop on the influencer marketing trend. Build relationships, collaborate with influencers and compensate them for promoting your brand. Don’t focus on the following of the influencers instead focus on how engaging their content can be.
14. Use hashtags
Hashtags are a new trend to follow. Everyone is using them to attract more people to their blogs and posts. Using hashtags on major social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram will help you bring more people into your account and website.
Use trendy hashtags because that’s the only way you’ll pop up in the audiences’ feeds. It is beneficial for a Twitter profile for two reasons: Twitter provides a list of trending hashtags, and it allows users to see tweets in that specific hashtag category. Because of their popularity, Instagram also introduced the same and is also flourishing.
So, don’t forget to add hashtags in all your posts. Make it worthy by choosing the right hashtags according to your niche.
15. Analytics
Analyzing your performance on social media is very important. There are tons of analytics tools that’ll help you identify your top-performing content, performance trends, and the number of people viewing each post.
Engagement is another measure used by brands to identify the performance of your content. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram allow you to use business functions to see the preferences of your users.
So, you need to measure your performance to understand what people want and then provide them with that accordingly.
Follow the above tips to improve your presence on social media. Clearly state your goals, plan a strategy, and then post content according to your audiences’ needs. By doing this, you will surely be ahead in the game and find success on social media.
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