Social media lets businesses easily publish shareable, engaging, and recurrent content in a way that is simply not possible through a website or an email campaign. However, receiving the maximum benefit out of a company’s social media presence needs more than just sharing a meme once every week; it necessitates a calculated, dedicated approach that is customized to reflect your brand’s quality.
Social media platforms allow users direct public interaction between businesses and their customers. Such interaction, depending on how it is utilized, can be either a boon or a bane from a marketing standpoint.
Most businesses use social media but very few know how to effectively do so. There exists a massive discrepancy between businesses that cleverly use their social media platforms to increase sales and those that struggle to captivate their audience on the very same platforms. Thankfully, this disparity can be easily overcome through some effort and perseverance.
Let us explore some of the small yet significant changes you can make to your social media strategy to fully exploit the marketing power of the platform.
1. Personify Your Company
Social media users, including your customers, don’t want to hear about your business strategy or your product specifications. Instead, they are seeking to make connections with those just like them. They want to see human faces, hear human voices, and learn human stories. They want to know how you have built your brand and who your employees are.
You need to showcase your brand as trustworthy, depicting positive anecdotes about you and your employees. Humanize your company by celebrating your employees’ achievements and their successes, sharing videos of your pets and children, and telling stories of how you have built the company.
What the science says:
- Emotionally connected customers are 52% more valuable than highly satisfied customers.
- Emotionally connected customers spend twice as much annually than highly satisfied customers.
2. Share Engaging Content
What drives social media algorithms, especially on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, is engagement. Comments and other interactions not only keep your audience invested in your social media presence but also let social media platforms know that you’re attracting eyeballs, which in turn leads them to promote your content.
Here are a few ways you can keep your audience engaged:
- Caption your content with questions or requests for responses. For example, ending your posts with a simple “What do you think?” or “Share your favorite thing about [your product]” can generate a lot more additional comments.
- Conduct sweepstakes, giveaways, and competitions. Ask your audience to use hashtags, share your posts, or tag others in exchange for a chance to win your products.
- Share videos. Video content drives social media engagement than any other form of content on almost every platform.
- Respond to comments and messages. Learn to efficiently manage your notifications and messages so that you don’t ignore too many attempts at communications from your customers. Politely respond to negative feedback and ensure that the discussions stay positive, at least from your end.
- Encourage your employees to like, comment on, and share your content.
What the science says:
- One in three people goes to competitors if ignored by a company on social media.
- Video content on Instagram generates more than twice the number of comments as images do.
3. Follow the Trends
An excellent way of retaining and expanding your audience is by starting conversations around trending topics. Whether it is cinnamon toast shrimp, Piers Morgan’s takes on Gregg’s vegan sausages, or cryptocurrency, get in on the action.
A recent example of this strategy being put to good use is Chipotle when they did a “Burritos or Bitcoin” giveaway on “National Burrito Day.” They exploited the increasing interest in bitcoin to generate massive attention, so much so that their website server crashed within a few minutes of the start of the giveaway.
Use hashtags, but not too many. Perform trial and error to find the optimum number of hashtags that bring your posts the most attention. You can also take this a step further by using hashtag management tools like Hashtagify.
Source: chipotle.com
4. Share Cross-Platform Content
With companies having a presence across diverse social media platforms, they need to be aware of the nitty-gritty of each such platform. Different social media platforms have different formats both for text and media. It is important to be aware of the rules and preferred image resolutions to optimize your content.
Here are a few basic guidelines that will help you ensure that your company retains its marketability across platforms:
- Link from one social media platform to others. Share links to your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from your LinkedIn account and vice-versa. Use Linktree in your Instagram bio to connect your audience with news, blogs, and social media. Provide social media share buttons on blog posts and web pages that allow users an easy way to share content.
- Learn the image sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios. Resize your images and videos accordingly. Check out this handy size guide from Sprout Social.
- Connect social media accounts with each other to simplify sharing. For instance, Instagram allows you to automatically share your posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. However, if doing this, be careful about the aspect ratios, hashtags, tags, retweet information, and other platform-specific aspects.
5. Conduct Research
Research different platforms to see which one you should focus on. Some social media sites, notably Facebook and Instagram, reach a larger audience while LinkedIn helps you connect with business owners, clients, and partners. Decide what is important to you and allocate more resources there.
Most social media sites provide business pages access to in-built tools and analytics that help users visualize traffic. Outside of social media, tools like Google Analytics and Jetpack help you analyze advertising data and website traffic. Use these tools in conjunction with each other to decide the best path forward
What the Science says:
- The average engagement with a Facebook post is 0.16 percent with Instagram, 0.046 percent with Twitter, and 1.73 percent with Instagram
