The first step towards creating an effective social media strategy is understanding your audience. Before thinking about creating a social media presence, you need to know what they care about, how they communicate, where they hang out online, and why they follow you or interact with you.
Social media is an excellent way to communicate with your customers and build connections. However, it can also be a challenge for small businesses that don’t have the resources of larger companies that help to build social media presence. In this post, we will look at 7 ways small businesses can improve their social media presence.
Table of Content
- 1 1. Must set goals before starting
- 2 2. Choose the right social media platform for your business.
- 3 3. Identify Your Audience
- 4 4. Create a Calendar to improve Social Media Presence.
- 5 5. You Must be a Human
- 6 6. Create Content That People Want To Share
- 7 7. Maintain a Consistent and Focused Social Media Presence
- 8 In summary, these are some key takeaways to create social media presence:
1. Must set goals before starting
Why are you using social media?
What are you going to get by creating social media presence?
Brands today are almost always using social media in one way, shape, or another.
However, not every brand has an active, thriving social presence.
How much of them are just sitting there?
In short, brands should set long-term and short-term goals that are specific, measurable (using tools), achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
You need some structure. You need a social media strategy After all, you don’t reach the level of Wendy’s on Twitter totally by accident.
The first step is setting clear goals for your social media efforts.
What do you want to accomplish with your social channels?
Do you want more followers? More engagement? Do you want to be seen as the best in your industry?
Make sure whatever your goal is, it’s something you know you can measure. If not, you won’t ever know whether you’ve achieved it.
Once you’ve set your goals, you need to create a plan for achieving them.
Before you begin planning out your social media marketing campaign, it’s important to decide which networks are best suited for your needs. For example, if you sell products online, Facebook may be a better choice than Twitter.
Once you’ve decided what networks will work best for your business, create an editorial calendar to outline when each network should be updated. This way, you’ll always be sure to post content regularly, and you won’t miss any opportunities…
Once you have a solid plan in place, it’s time to actually share information. To keep your audience engaged, make sure all of your posts include images, videos, links, and other types of media. If possible, try to use multimedia formats like GIFs, photos, and video clips to increase engagement.
3. Identify Your Audience
After you’ve found out your goals, you need to outline your target audience. Because “everyone” is not an audience for a specific business.
Maybe it’s prospective customers. Perhaps it’s industry players and influencers. Either way, breaking down your audience will help you figure out the following:
Which social media sites you’re active on
Your posting schedule
The type of content you publish brand’s voice
The bio in your profiles
Many brands waste time spinning their wheels when they’re not posting content that speaks to an identified audience. Spend some time thinking about who your ideal customer persona might be and why he/she would come to you instead of someone else. Then think about which existing brand(s) they like most and see if there’s any overlap between them.
This competitive analysis may help you understand how your own social media presence can stand out from the crowd.
4. Create a Calendar to improve Social Media Presence.
Today, if you’re a brand, there’s a good chance you’re using social media in one way, shape, or another.
However, not every brand has an active, thriving social presence.
And how many of them are just sitting there?
In reality, you can not expect much from social platforms when you are just posting random images, videos, links, and mentioning a few folks and call it a day.
Structure helps keep things organized. You need a social marketing plan after all; otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to get so far without one.
5. You Must be a Human
This is a big one.
In the market, there is a lot of tools which automate the social media presence for businesses.
If you want people to like you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., one of the biggest mistakes you could possibly make would be to come across as an impersonal company with no real character at all. People today are looking for ways to connect with companies on a more personal level than ever before.
Brands today often joke and don’t shy away from talking directly to their fans just like they might speak to their friends. In contrast, brands used to be lambasted for coming across as too robotic; however, they now need to come across as human if they want to maintain their brand image.
Showing off the human side of our brands means showcasing the people who help us create them. It doesn’t really matter if they’re pictures from your office or snaps taken at an event; whether it’s selfies or group shots, having some kind of human interaction with your audience helps them feel like part of something bigger than themselves.
The most important thing to remember when creating content for social media is that you should be providing value to your audience.
It doesn’t matter what type of content you share, but rather that it’s valuable to your target market. If you’re sharing information about a new product launch, provide helpful tips and tricks to keep your followers engaged.
Also, Hashtags are a great tool to use if you want to find conversations happening about your topic online.
For instance, let’s say you wanted to promote your new product launch. You could create a hashtag like a new product launch and then tweet about it.
Now, whenever anyone uses this hashtag, they’ll see your tweet appear in their feed.
7. Maintain a Consistent and Focused Social Media Presence
Social media isn’t a day or a month deal. It asks for time and patience both to make a good social media presence.
The first step in building a successful social media presence is creating an audience. This means you need to build relationships with people who are interested in what you have to say and then get them to follow you.
Once you’ve built up a base of loyal fans, it’s time to start sharing content that will attract new followers and will come with consistency.
Do you have assigned many guys for posting and interacting with the people on your social media platforms? You should not do that.
You should limit the number of people creating content, posting, and interacting with people and assure that each one sync with your Brand Image.
You have to share relevant content consistently and regularly wherever you are creating your social media presence.
This may sound obvious, but most companies forget about this step.
It’s easy to say “I’ll tweet once a week” or “I’ll share one article every month.” But what happens when you miss a week or skip a month?
1. Understand your audience.
2. Set clear goals.
3. Choose the right social media platform.
4. Create engaging posts.
5. Identify your audience.
6. Maintain a consistent and focused social media presence.
7. Don’t forget to maintain a human face!
Thank you for reading this. Please give your feedback/suggestions if any, I would love to hear.
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