Given the prevalence and the popularity of social media across the world, businesses, no matter what their niche, have to have a presence on social media if they hope to be seen as credible. If you consider how you conduct your online activities in your personal life and you find a company that can offer certain things to you, where is the first place you look them up? Most people would say Google, but the rest of us would say social media.
If a business has a website but no social media presence, then it lacks the ability to see what people really think of them. A social media presence gives people somewhere to air any issues and give any good feedback. So having a social media presence is important for a company.
Being on social media itself is not enough for your marketing plan, but you do need to have a balance between your website and your social media presence. So let’s take a look at 10 tips that can help you to elevate your social media marketing strategy and become more popular in your niche.
- Be definitive with your goals. What are you going to aim for if you don’t have a target? It’s important that you write down why you do everything that you do in your business so that you have a strategy that you can build. For example, if you decide to hire a social media company or a search engine optimization company. The goals that you have for that business will be the driving force of your whole social media strategy. It’s important that you write down goals that are specific and attainable, but they also have to be measurable and achievable in the right time frame. Once you get your goals written down, you can determine how you’re going to build your social media strategy and whether you’re going to go it alone or get someone to help you.
- Learn who your target audience really is. Social media is far reaching and there is more than one platform for it. This means that you’re going to need to determine where your target audience is likely to populate. There is no point in pumping money into Facebook advertising if all of your audience is going to Tiktok or Twitter .Drawing your social media strategy around your audience is an absolute must. Your audience has to have the spotlight because you need to be able to create messages that resonate with them. There’s no point in putting out social media posts if you can’t attract your audience at the same time. Success will be determined by who your audience is and where you can find them, so it’s essential to define their questions, their problems, and any of their concerns.
- Pick the right platforms. We touched on this one a minute ago, but it’s not necessary to be available on every single social media platform. It might be a full time job for two or three people, and if you can’t afford their salaries, there’s really no point in making this strategy up. If your brand’s Instagram marketing strategy works best, sticking to Instagram is a great idea. There’s no point trying to be a Jack of all Socials and a master of none!
- Build a plan.There is plenty of research out there that supports marketers who document their strategy. In fact, you are likely to be far more effective and likely to succeed when you have a documented social media marketing plan. Penning down a social media marketing strategy is key to turning your vision into something real. While you are getting your social media marketing plan down, make sure that you’re reaching out to outsourced agencies to help you out. You don’t have to be a search engine optimization expert when somebody else can be the expert for you.
- A content calendar. The one thing that you have to realize about social media is that you need to post consistently if you want people to take notice. Failing to plan is planning to fail and all that. So make sure that you have your content calendar mapped out. You can do this week on week, or you can do it month by month, but either way, you need to have a specific idea of where you want your content to go and how you want it. There are plenty of templates online to help you to repair your content calendar. The best thing about it is that it enables you to set timings for posts so that you can literally spend a day setting up social media postings and then schedule them to come out on time.
- Be a storyteller. One thing that companies have yet to realise is that it’s not just about the product or the service that’s being packed, it’s all about the story that sells. As human beings, we connect more to stories than we do anything else because it’s the emotional attachment that brands build with their audience that works. Stories inspire ideas, and they encourage interaction.It’s not the only way to tell a story, of course. There are simpler ways, too. But to move your audience, you need to make sure that you’re sharing the right stories and information to build excitement and help them to relate.
- Give your brand the human factor. If you’re just churning out artificially intelligent social media postings, it doesn’t tell people that you are actual people behind the buttons. Digital innovations have made it much easier to communicate, but it’s that emotional connection we want. So go beyond the glass tops of digital screens and show people the behind the scenes. If you’re planning a social media strategy, make sure you’re panning the camera into the office and doing a day in the life of what your brand is doing. Your brand stories are not adverts and they’re not sales pitches, but they just give people a little more insight as to who you are behind the scenes, the stories. Tell them what you stand for and they’ll display your culture more than you think.
- Don’t forget to use emojis. You might not be of the generation that uses emojis regularly in their text messaging, but when it comes to your social media posts, you do need to use it. If you’re making the right waves with emojis, you’re going to show people your intent behind your words. If you say something that’s tongue in cheek then you can use the emoji where people are sticking their tongue out to show that. It’s important to convey the tone and the emotion behind the message you’re giving, and the glitch with the written text is that it can come across in any way that is misinterpreted by anybody. Five people can read the same sentence in five different ways, but emojis can help to convey exactly what you’re trying to say.
- Don’t be afraid of social media tools. There is nothing worse than trying to post on social media manually. If you’ve got four different social media platforms for your business, you don’t want to have to put 12 posts out there a day because you’ll have to post 3 times on each platform every day. Instead of doing that, utilise social media business tools and get on board with the business suites that are involved. There are social media management tools and companies out there that can do it for you to auto post your updates to all of your feeds at the same time. You’ll also be able to write and then rewrite your posts for the correct social media platforms. You have different character limits and you have different abilities on each social media platform, so you need to get familiar with those.
- It’s OK to make mistakes. Part of your marketing journey is going to be to post the right things and post the wrong things. And when you make mistakes, you’re able to learn from them. If you’ve made a grammar mistake or missed a comma, don’t delete the post. People will notice if you take down your posts and repost them again, so you can either edit them or you can make a new post laughing at yourself for the mistakes that you’ve made. If you make a mistake in the content itself, you can use your social media to put out an apology, which is going to reach your audience on a bigger level. It is important that if you’re going to put any posts out on social media that they are spelling and grammatically correct, but you want to make sure that if you do miss a mistake or you’ve had someone look over it and they’ve even missed a mistake, that you address it later on.
Now that you know how to elevate your social media marketing strategy, where do you plan to get started?