How To Effectively Market Your Business On Social Media
Utilizing social media is an essential marketing tactic for any type of business. If you aren’t marketing your brand on social media, you are missing out on an excellent way to reach your target customers, increase your visibility and generate new sales. Below, we’ve outlined steps to take in order to effectively market your business on social media, whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned user!
Marketing Your Brand on Social Media
Identify Your Marketing Goals
When first developing your social media plan or perhaps brainstorming a refreshed approach to your current strategy, it’s important to consider the goals you are hoping to accomplish. Some goals could include:
- Generating more leads
- Creating better brand awareness
- Engaging with current and future customers
- Secure user-generated content
Then, consider the reasons why followers would follow your brand on social media. Some reasons likely include:
- They’re interested in learning more about your products or services
- They are looking to access exclusive promotions, sales or giveaways
- Your content is amusing or entertaining in some way
- They need to connect with your brand’s customer service
Once you establish why you should use social media and what type of content you should share, it will be much easier to develop a strategy that will work to achieve your goals.
Develop A Social Media Content Calendar
Research, Audit Others & Seek Inspiration:
Once you solidify your goals and identify what types of content your followers would engage with, it’s time to develop a content calendar. When doing this, first consider looking at your competition and what kinds of content they are sharing on social media. If you already have social media channels you’ve been posting on, conduct an audit to see what has been working and what hasn’t. Find inspiration in brands even outside your industry that you could work on your channels!
Determine A Cadence of Posting & Strategy Per Channel:
It’s important to keep a steady cadence of posts going on each of your channels. Each platform will need posts with a different strategy in mind. Consider how your target audience uses these channels. For example, with Twitter, it will be critical to use hashtags. With Instagram, you’ll want to ensure beautiful or engaging visual content is showcased.
Identify Content Bucket Areas:
When creating the calendar, populate it with a variety of content buckets. This will depend on what service or product you offer. For example, you could have a content bucket that is ‘behind the scenes’ and once a week you share a live video taking fans into a staff-only space (such as a collections or an archive room in a museum!) or feature a historical photo that has never been seen before. Another content bucket could be promotions or sales posts, while another could be company blog posts featuring thought leadership content. Maybe you want to showcase a staff member of the month, let influencers host social media takeovers on your page. The content possibilities are endless!
Decide Post Frequency & Evaluate Performance Metrics:
Decide how many posts you want to feature each month on each channel. Some social media channels, like Facebook, tend to decrease in engagement if you post too often and only show up to a small number of followers. However, with channels like Twitter, brands can see excellent results by posting many times a day. Once you share content for a couple months, review the metrics on the posts and identity what times and days of the week you see the highest engagement, and then adjust as needed based on when your audience is most active.
Consider Post Automation:
If you’re running a small business and don’t have the time to post manually each time you would like to share a post, consider investing in an automation tool, like Sprout Social or Hootsuite.
Engage With Those Who Matter
Once you’ve established your social media accounts and have content published regularly, it’s important to begin engaging. Social media should be social, right?!
Engagement is a key component of any successful social media strategy. Any way that you or your followers interact with other profiles is considered engagement. This includes likes, comments, shares and more.
The first step is interacting with fans that engage with your content. Does a follower ask a question in the comments on one of your posts? Be sure to reply in a timely manner, offering a solution or details on how they can contact you directly (should they need to provide an order number or something to that effect). Consider developing pre-written replies to FAQ or customer service issues that can be referenced as needed.
The second step is interacting with partners, community organizations, reporters, influencers and whoever else is relevant to your business. Retweet them, comment on their posts and find ways to support them.
The third step? Be consistent! Set a schedule for yourself or for the person who manages your brand’s social media channels. Perhaps twice a day they are checking your channels to engage, and three times a week they are engaging with partners and whoever else is relevant to your business. Throughout this process showcase your brand voice and have some fun with it!
Enable Tactics To Drive Traffic To Your Social Media Channels
Now that you’re doing great things on your social media accounts, be sure that your customers know you have these channels! If you publish email newsletters, consider adding a “follow us on social” section to the bottom of the note. You can also include social media icons on your company website, and encourage employees to include them in their email signatures.
Implement Social Listening
As defined by Hootsuite, “social listening is when you track your social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand. Then you analyze them for insights to discover opportunities to act.”
They suggest implementing this as a two-step process. First, monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, products and keywords related to your business. Following this, analyze what you’re learned and put it into key takeaways. Brainstorm what action can be taken. It could be responding to a delighted buyer, or shifting your messaging or strategy entirely. This is something that can be meaningful to look at quarterly. Are there trends or or mentions that come up again and again? Consider how you’ll like to utilize that opportunity or address it if it’s negative.
Additional Informative Resources:
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