Social media can often be seen as the Holy Grail to successful online marketing. But when you don’t get the results you were hoping for, and you’re not seeing your post views or conversions increasing, it can be rather deflating.
So, how can you get your social media platforms working for you and building your online presence? Follow our top tips to get you started.
- Set your goals – before you start posting anything, you’ve got to understand what you want to achieve from your social media activity. Without clear goals, you run the risk that your content may lack purpose, consistency and actually work against you. For example, do you want to drive traffic to your website, generate new leads or increase brand awareness? Use the S.M.A.R.T. framework to help you:
- S – Specific.
- M – Measurable.
- A – Attainable.
- R – Relevant.
- T – Timely.
- Know your audience – do you know who your target audience is and are they relevant to your business? Don’t waste your efforts by targeting audiences that have little or no interest in what you are offering. Get to know and understand who your typical customer is and the likelihood they will buy from you.
- Create a social media plan – get your ducks in a row and create a plan. Decide what type of content you want to post, how often and when. The clearer and more detailed your social media plan, the easier it is to follow and monitor activity. But remember, it’s not set in stone; allow for flexibility and adjustment.
- Choose your social media channels carefully – one mistake that people tend to make when it comes to social media marketing is spreading themselves too thin. By that we mean don’t be tempted to promote your company on too many platforms. Choose the social media channels that are most suited to your type of business.
- Decide on your brand guidelines – work out your brand guidelines, such as tone of voice, brand colours, the style of messaging, type of images, whether you want to use emojis or not, and the hashtags to use and avoid. Make sure everyone that will be posting on your platforms follow these guidelines to ensure brand consistency.
- A picture says a thousand words – our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. That means 90% of the information we transmit to our brains is visual. Always add a visual aspect to any post, whether it’s picture, video, photograph, infographic or any other visually stimulating image.
- Content really does matter – your social media content represents your brand, your business and your customer service. Aim to make it engaging, informative, relevant and something that your audience wants to share with others. Try not to be too general; your target audience wants the content you post to be of interest and relevant to them so always keep your audience in mind.
- Monitor, analyse and adjust – as important as all the above tips are, if you don’t monitor your social media activity and work out which posts are generating results and which ones aren’t, and adjust your activity accordingly, it’s going to be difficult to justify your time and budget.
We hope our tips have given you a better insight into how you can boost the success of your social media activity. However, we do have to persuade you to be patient. Having any online activity going viral overnight is actually very rare. It takes time to build up your online presence, increasing brand awareness and subsequently sales.
Be consistent and post regularly; it’s not good to be hot on your social media activity for a few weeks then forget because you’re a bit busy for a while. Decide how often a week you want to, or can, post across your social media channels and stick to it.
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