With the ability to improve brand awareness, connect with your customers, and increase web traffic, social media is an essential marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. Effectively managing your social platforms to yield results requires executing an inbound marketing strategy that focuses on audience centric content, data driven campaigns, and optimized content scheduling. To ensure your platforms are being used to their full potential, we’ve compiled a list of 6 tips to effectively market your business on social media:
1. Start With Strategy
Social media should not be considered a megaphone for your business but rather a critical component that requires its own strategy to contribute to the success of your business goals.
Developing a strategy starts with asking yourself the 5 W’s:
- Who is your target audience?
- What type of content are you going to post?
- When are you going to post this content?
- Where are you going to post this content?
- Why are you posting?
Once you have determined the answers to these preliminary questions, you can begin building out a strategy that is targeted towards both your audience and your goals. Keep in mind that tracking and evaluating the success of your social media strategy will rely heavily on analyzing key metrics and shifting your content accordingly.
2. Select the right platforms to target
Now that you’ve created a social media strategy, it’s important to determine which platforms are right for your business and will yield results. If you have pre-existing channels, a quick assessment of their efficiency can be done by reviewing each channel’s audience size and engagement metrics. If you are new to social media and in the midst of selecting which platforms to use, consider your audience, their habits, demographics, and social platform preferences based on your industry and product offering.
If you remain unsure, analyze your competitors digital presence in order to determine where and how they are connecting with their customers. Tapping into the same platforms will significantly increase your chances of a relevant audience viewing and engaging with your content.
3. Schedule and automate your content publishing
Creating one-off posts is not an ideal method for publishing and leads to a lack of strategic content creation. Using a social media management tool allows you to build a content calendar and schedule posts to ensure you maintain engagement, build brand loyalty, and improve consistency.
There are many options when it comes to choosing the right social media management tool for your business based on budget and requirements, but here are a few worth considering: Hootsuite, Loomly, Sprout Social, and Buffer.
4. Focus on Quality vs Quantity
Creating and distributing quality content across your platforms is far more important than posting for the sake of posting. In 2021, we will continue to experience the ever evolving social media algorithms that determine where and how content is prioritized across all social platforms, each with their own unique set of factors that influence your ranking.
In order to combat the challenges associated with highly saturated social media channels, always keep your audience top of mind when developing content to ensure you are fostering engagement, answering key questions, and adding value.
5. Showcase your brand through compelling, consistent visuals
Social media platforms provide the perfect opportunity to showcase your brand and it’s personality through the use of graphics, imagery, and video. Creating visual content that resonates with your audience will differentiate you from your competitors and assist in building brand awareness.
With user friendly software such as Canva available at little to no cost, you can create consistent brand content and leverage templates to ensure a cohesive application of your brand across all platforms. If time and/or experience is not on your side, consider outsourcing to a design professional. Many business owners and bloggers do this – and it’s money well spent.
6. Track and Monitor Performance Metrics
Tracking your social media analytics is critical to better understanding your audience, identifying successful strategies, and what adjustments are required in order to improve performance.
With the majority of social platforms now offering analytics and insights to the user, it has never been easier to track, monitor, and optimize your content. When evaluating the effectiveness of your current social media strategy, analyze the following metrics:
- Engagement (Likes, comments, shares, clicks)
- Impressions & Reach
- Referrals & Conversions
- Follower growth
- Social Sentiment
