Social media is a gift to businesses and marketers alike. There are these places where millions of people congregate and happily spend hours browsing content. A lot of the content can be posted for free, and if by chance you hit on a trend or event, you can go viral to the globe in a matter of hours. You can also disappear into obscurity and talk to your digital self.
There is a lot of opportunity in social media, if you understand how to maximize its potential. Here are ten of the most important tips that will help you grow your business through social media.
Segment your audience
As with any form of marketing, you need to understand your audience. You need to create a profile of your typical customer or customers. How old are they? What gender? How much money do they earn? Where do they live? What do they do for a living? What do they enjoy doing in their spare time? The more refined the profile, the better your efforts will be in targeting your content.
If you have money and time to spare it is possible to “follow” real people who represent your profiled audience. This is a polite way of saying stalk them across social media channels. This may seem a little weird – however, by looking at what real people post, share and like, you can gain valuable insight into the sort of copy you should be producing for your audience.
Locate your audience
You audience will frequent a small corner of the social media world. Facebook might seem a safe bet with its 2 billion active users – however – this still may not be the best bet in targeting your segment of the market. For instance, urban 30+ women are more than likely found on Instagram, but middle-aged men will be happier on LinkedIn. Facebook is still skewed towards the younger, more social demographic and Twitter is most frequented by politicians with low attention spans and over eager journalists.
To maximize your efforts on social media you need to look at the metrics for where your audience frequent, when they are likely to be browsing content and the sort of content they spend time looking at.
Create a consistent schedule
You need to create a posting schedule. You cannot post irregularly and have much hope of reaching your audience. You want to become a regular voice in the lives of your customers if you want social media to have its full impact. Therefore, you need to decide if you’ll post daily or at least consistently through the week. The ideal would be that your audience are waiting for your next post because they enjoy what you have to say. This can only be achieved if they are in the habit of noticing your contributions on social media.
Coordinate your message across channels
If you post a blog with click-worthy content, the best way to increase its impact is by simultaneously posting it on Facebook and tweeting a link on Twitter. It could be that you post an image on Instagram that you also pin on Pinterest. By coordinating your posts across channels, you raise the noise of the post. You obviously make it possible for more people to see your ideas, but also encourage people to click across channels.
There are software packages that will allow you to post simultaneously – so, if you post a blog on your WordPress site then it will automatically tweet and post on Facebook, promoting the blog for you.
Include calls to action
Social media may be called social – but it is business. There is no way you would write copy for your website without guiding your audience to understand what to do next. Therefore, when crafting your message on social media, remember to include calls to action – letting the audience know what they should do if they want to engage with your business.
Monitor your efforts
You need to pay attention to the metrics. Your efforts must be assessed for impressions, so you can start to refine your approach and your message. You also need to assess how your audience seems to prefer to receive the message. Does your audience prefer to read an article, watch a video or just glance at a meme? By looking at the data you can start to craft your contribution and make social media work even harder for you.
Be creative with your message
There is a lot of noise on the internet. There are a lot of people vying for the attention of your audience. This means that the message you craft must be interesting and relevant – in that moment. There is a lot of work being done in marketing to give real-time insight to marketers. It is often too late to craft a message once you discover it is interesting to your audience – so, you need to know up-to-the-minute what people are digesting and what trends are interesting.
The other alternative is to use keyword research for SEO and craft content around the keywords your customers most use. This is often a more realistic means of creating content than aiming to be the starter of trends.
Collate and share interesting content
Your hope is that you will become a thought leader for your audience. You want them to see you as an expert in your field and able to educate, inform and engage them in the latest issues in your area. This means that you should be actively seeking out and finding interesting articles, videos and images to share with your audience.
Pay to boost
One of the great benefits of social media is that it is free. However, if you really want your content to be seen – if you think you have a gem of a post that needs to be seen – then you can pay to have it pinned to the newsfeed of your audience. This boost may be enough to really engage your audience and it doesn’t cost that much – so may be a reasonable investment for the outcome.
Outsource your social media management
What you may have decided by now is that this social media marketing is complicated and time-consuming. It isn’t that difficult, but it can suck up time and energy if you are not careful. Therefore, one of the most important tips to consider is outsourcing your social media management to experts… and it just so happens we know of some excellent social media marketers here in Miami who could really make the most of your social media presence…!
