ADS Top 8 Social Media Tips for Business
Utilising online social networks for business can be daunting, especially when you are just starting out your social media marketing journey.
There are a wide range of social media platforms available online used by billions of people every day.
From Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and LinkedIn, there are a number of different places online where you can begin to advertise your product or service directly to your target audience.
Social media can easily help you to showcase your range of products or services, gain leads to your website or blog posts and can help to build a relationship with your audience, but many people are unsure of how to use social media to their businesses full advantage.
Agile Digital Strategy have compiled a list of our top 8 social media tips to suit both big and small businesses improve their online marketing efforts. These social media tips will increase your visibility online.
1. Start off with a Plan
If you are beginning to use social media to promote your business, then it can often be overwhelming due to the number of options. At Agile Digital Strategy, our first social media tip is that before you make any social media accounts, sit down and create a plan of action – also known as a Digital Marketing Strategy.
In this plan, define the long term goals that you want to achieve from your social media journey. Once you have that done, create sustainable short term goals that can act as a stepping stone to help you reach your long term goals and how you will measure their success. For example, a long term goal may be to create Brand Awareness for your business via social media. Short term goals will then be posting 3 days a week on Facebook, and you will measure your success via likes, comments and shares on those posts. Often, many businesses reach out to a third party to help them build their digital marketing strategy.
Having a solid plan, objectives, and goals are so important because without a clear strategy, you could easily underestimate the demand for your digital services. Also, a plan of action will keep you on track for reaching your goals without getting side-tracked.
2. Define your Target Audience
Many people jump into using social media for their business, without taking time to think about who they are trying to reach. In your social media plan, it’s so important to define your target audience.
Targeting a specific audience may seem exclusive, but it doesn’t mean that you are eliminating people from your social media posts – it just means that you are focusing your marketing efforts towards the people who are most likely to benefit your business.
Our second social media tip is to define your audience utilising research as to which social media network they are most likely on. For example, brands aimed at B2B customers would benefit from being on LinkedIn due to the audience there being jobseekers and corporate clients are, whereas fashion brands would more than likely benefit from Instagram instead due to a younger audience and options to showcase products easily.
3. Create Engaging Content
Your social media content is going to be what attracts followers to your page, and it will keep them returning. To do this, you want to have interesting and engaging content for your followers to view. High quality and engaging content offers your followers knowledge, inspiration, a good laugh, or something useful or entertaining online to view.
This can be done through a range of different types of content, including text, video content, podcasts, live video streams, images, graphic designs and more.
Relevant and interesting content can help you establish your brand as an authority in the industry, which can build brand recognition and creates trust among your leads and customers. Our top tips to creating an engaging piece of content are:
- Developing a brand – Keep your graphics the same colours as your logo/website. Use the same fonts. Develop a theme with a clear tone of voice for your brand.
- Plan out your content in advance with a content calendar.
- Keep an eye on your competitors and see what they are doing – this can help you to gain inspiration for your own company.
4. Communicate with your Audience
The days of intrusive marketing have been left behind us. It is now important to keeping sales tactics to a minimum when promoting your business on social media. When people log onto social media accounts, they don’t want to be bombarded with sales pitch after sales pitch, but they would rather discover interesting content that resonates with them.
Find the correct tone to use when communicating with your audience. Why? Because this allows your brand to have a voice. Humanizing your brand makes your business more relatable to your customers. Avoid strong sales pitches and begin to talk to your audience as somebody whom they can trust and relate to. If your audience trusts you, they will want to buy from you.
A well designed landing page on your website will help increase conversion rate.
5. Be Consistent
Consistency is key in your social media marketing strategy. Being consistent on your brands social media pages allows you to grow in audience engagement and reach. When you post consistently, social media algorithms will begin to favour your posts. This allows your social media posts to appear more often to your audience allowing more people to view them.
The best plan of action is to research when is the best time to post on social media channels. Finding the right time that majority of your target audience is essential when planning your content marketing. Through trail and error, post on social channels at different times over a few weeks. Then take a look at your analytics to see which post performs best at specific times. Make sure you always utilise analytics to your advantage.
A great way of staying consistent is utilising social media scheduling tools. They allow you to plan your content in bulk and then scheduling it to automatically be uploaded in advance. This allows you to dedicate one block of time per day or even per week to creating your social content, which in the long term saves you time when focusing on other tasks throughout the day. Try out social media tools such as Hootesuite, Buffer, Planoly and Later.
5. Utilise Facebook Ads
Don’t underestimate the power of Facebook Ads! Facebook Ads is a brilliant cost-effective way to market your business online. Facebook has roughly 2.85 billion monthly active users on the platform, which means that Facebook advertising is a great tool to reach your exact audience. When a person signs up to their Facebook page, they input a lot of information about themselves including their age, interests, behaviour, and location. Facebook ads allows you to place your product or service right in front of your target audience quickly and easily.
On Facebook, you have an option to either create a Pay Per Click (PPC) Ad Campaign or you can boost your social media posts. You can input information about your target market and who you want the post to reach. The more you know your target audience, the better your ad will perform. Facebook also allows you to create a budget for your advertisements to stop you from overspending.
7. Optimise your posts for SEO
Optimising your content for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become really important for your social media posts. MOZ has defined SEO as the “practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”. Many don’t realise the significance of optimising your social media posts for SEO. Having better information on your pages can help social media profiles rank in search results and gain more followers and engagement.
Your social media posts should include your websites keywords to improve your businesses google rankings. Placing keywords into your social posts will result in search engines likely seeing your website as more relevant due to the social media pages being linked to your website.
Social media should always act as a stepping stone to your website to generate sales, so ensuring that your website and social media channels have the ability to rank on Google’s search engine will increase your chances of being seen online by your target audience.
8. Use your Customers Generated Content
Encourage customers to review products and to tag you on their social media posts. Post link to the product featured to direct other customers to the website to purchase the item or service.
If one of your customers posts a picture of your product or leaves a review, use the content as a testimonial. Retweet or share them to your Instagram Stories to let customers know about your product or services.
Using User Generated Content helps to fill in the gaps in your social media marketing scheduling plan.
Conclusion: Trust the Process
Getting into a rhythm with social media can take time. Don’t be hard on yourself if your posts don’t immediately gain a large volume of engagement. It takes time to build a relationship with your audience on social media, so don’t stop your social media marketing efforts at the first hurdle!
Marketing is tough, and it’s a constant learning process to acquire potential customers. If you are getting discouraged with your marketing efforts after a number of weeks, then take time to review your strategy and see what positive changes you could implement to change strategy and drive success.
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