Social media reaches at least 2 billion people globally. You have access to a local and an international audience in one place. One of the most essential marketing strategies is an effective and cohesive approach to social media. This means having your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter presence, but it is also means coordinating your approach across the platforms.
There are a thousand and one strategies you could employ – but which of these strategies will offer a return on the investment of time and money. Here is our summary of the most effective use of social media for the growth of your business.
Be consistent
A social media campaign is about building relationships with customers and potential customers. It is about helping your customers become part of a community that you are at the heart of. A single post or tweet won’t achieve this. It may be that you will see no results over the course of a month. However, if you consistently interact with your audience over a year you are going to see significant traffic. Therefore, the most important strategy is consistency – be a presence and be trustworthy with the quantity and quality of content.
Know your audience
You need to know where you audience browses on social media. There are some generalised truths that can get you started. Middle aged men are more likely to be found on LinkedIn. Urban young women are more likely to be found on Instagram. If you are looking at the older generation your best hope is Facebook – even though this is where you are still most likely to find the new generation too.
These generalisations should only be the start of knowing your audience. You need to understand who your audience are, where they spend their time and, most importantly, why they spend time on social media. It is partly about demographics, such as location, age, gender, income, education level and more. It is also about psychology. What do your audience enjoy reading and when are they likely to want to read it?
Google analytics can help you with the demographics and with some information on when and where your audience browse. However, understanding the psychology of the audience requires much more subtle questioning of the brand and the relationship between the audience and your company. Using customer experience data and call centre information to work out what customers want to learn from the company is a good starting point. Once posts have started there is also the option to look at comments and responses to your content. Another source can be Subreddits which shows what communities are talking about in certain niches.
Build content that has value
A social media campaign needs to be current but also needs to be consistent. Therefore, you need to balance the need to have a bank of quality content that can be posted regularly, maintain the relationship with the audience, with the need to make that content up-to-date with the current trends. This means collecting together articles, blogs, infographics, images, videos, quick tips and more, that can fuel your social media content.
The type of content also needs some thought. If your content is always promotional, then it might be that your audience stop listening. The rule about the ratio between promotional and non-promotional is difficult to gauge. It is better to be cautious and consider sending out 20 or 30 non-promotional pieces to every promotional piece. This ratio might change after a year – but in the beginning it is a good idea to be more information and less self-promotion.
Get some followers
How can you be a thought leader when there is no one following you? How do you get followers without being a thought leader? The tough business of getting people to listen to you is no different online than it is in wider society. You need to produce content without ever knowing if anyone will ever read your posts.
The most effective way to get followers is to follow your target user. It is highly likely that all those that you follow will follow you in return. As you start getting followers, and followers start sharing your content, then you will get more people interested because of the content created.
There are ways to pay to play on social media – promoting posts and posting ads – however, what you really want are hooks. You want content that will trigger an action by the user. From this point of action, you can encourage the user to follow you on all your social media options.
Going viral
This is the ultimate aim of any social media campaign. Social media perpetuates word of mouth advertising like no other medium has ever succeeded in achieving. Create the right content and post it on Facebook and coordinate this with a link on Twitter and a small unknown start-up can become a household name in hours. The sort of name that would have normally taken months, maybe even years, to establish can be achieved instantly.
Creating content that goes viral is no straightforward task. Social media is a noisy place and it takes skill and an understanding of the trends of the moment to know the sort of content to post. Going viral might be a high ambition but producing “click bait” is a realistic goal.
Align choices to your company goals
All these choices on social media needs to align with the overall strategy of your company. There is no point in promoting a social media strategy that works independently or as a tag on to your everyday business. Your social media goal should work within the bigger picture – the content should reflect the values and direction of the company. If you do not match social media content with the direction of the company, then you are going to lose the trust of the potential customer who you have just spent time and money building a relationship with.
