Owning a business requires you to be present in order to gain new customers and maintain current ones. Social media makes it easy to establish a consistent presence with over 4.62 billion users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok. It’s no wonder why businesses use these channels to stay in touch with their target audiences.
Understand how your selected platforms work and how to maximize engagement. You can further your small business and increase revenue by creating an authentic and lovable social media presence. If you fear that your presence on social media is weak, don’t fret. Here are tips for creating a strong social media presence.
1. Create a Plan
Successful business strategies are founded on sound business plans. Just planning to do something doesn’t mean it will work. Your plan should follow the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant & Time-based) framework, which ensures that your objectives are specific and measurable, attainable, relevant and realistic, and time-bound—following this framework guarantees that you can achieve your goals within a reasonable period.
You should examine the business’s ideal image for its social media presence, taking into account the target audience. Looking at examples can help with the learning curve on how to handle this aspect of digital marketing.
2. Be Consistent, Creative, and Authentic
An effective strategy will collapse if there is no consistency. Crafting a presence requires consistency in posting. The great thing about posting content is that the type of content can be anything.
Whether to advertise or just to connect with your audience. A consistent posting schedule can help nurture these relationships and create a sense of familiarity between you and your customers.
Creativity in posting is also a must. However, this should be in line with the business’s image on social platforms. Being authentic also has its benefits.
Authenticity encourages emotional investment when consumers feel they are being treated as individuals by the brand. When this happens, the customer has a personal connection to the brand. In fact, 76% of emotionally invested customers are more likely to recommend brands or businesses they are loyal to, resulting in boosts in revenue.
3. Collect and Analyze Data
Customers respond to content in different ways. Tracking performance rates of advertisements or posts can help you better understand what works and what doesn’t. This fosters innovation and creativity, both of which support the business’s image to stay relevant and engaging.
4. Use Social Media as Customer Support
Social media is a direct channel for customers to voice their opinions about the goods or services your company offers. It is important to be professional in all customer interactions. Referring a dissatisfied client to a private conversation can help maintain professionalism.
This enhances your company’s image by showing that you value customers’ opinions. In addition, it promotes honest communication between you and your clients. Current customers are more likely to remain loyal to a company when they feel their concerns are being heard.
5. Invest in Video Content
Social media marketing should extend beyond the product, impacting the entire business. Video content can help you influence the company’s image by applying the same creativity and authenticity you apply to your social media presence.
In addition, video content is much easier to share than text and image-based content. This expands your market, bringing in more potential clients and increasing your customer conversion rate by 80%. Text and picture-based content will never surpass video content.
6. Hashtags are Essentials
Hashtags have been a part of social media culture for the better part of the existence of social media itself. Effective use of hashtags to connect and market your business helps drive engagement and traffic to your website. An excellent example of this is the #WantAnR8 campaign of Audi, which is also considered one of the most successful marketing campaigns in Twitter history.
Hashtags can also help connect with users during an event. Using hashtags in a strategic and planned manner will help with engagement and deepen existing connections.
7. Use Social Media for Sales
Social media is not only a place to share your business’s story and your products. Meta’s Facebook and Instagram both have internal marketplaces to sell your products. Marketplaces like these are also an opportunity to increase brand recognition by selling through them.
If a customer posted a review that you find shareable, share them. It enhances business and customer relationships and shows that you care. Interacting with customers’ published reviews is also a viable way of connecting with clients and advertising your product.
8. Use Trends
Following business trends can help the business grow financially. Following social media trends can help you reach more potential clients and convert that potential to revenue. It also entertains your target audience.
One example of this is meme marketing. You can use meme marketing to promote your product or service while also being entertaining. Netflix is a well-known user of meme marketing to promote their current shows and show off their content.
9. Crossposting Content
Crossposting content can save your business time and energy by posting the same content on different sites. It increases the number of people you can reach without increasing effort especially on content creation. Crossposting between platforms also increases sales.
However, you should note that post-performance will vary. This is because even though you have a specific target audience, cultures between social media sites differ. This shouldn’t be a problem as long as you research the differences between sites.
10. Use Automation to Lessen Work
Automation can reduce the amount of time you spend working and increase your business’s productivity. This technology complements different social media marketing plans because it reduces the amount of time necessary to post content or respond to comments on blog posts and other websites. You can now focus on other aspects of your business, including improving your product or service.
A customer service chatbot can be a great way to enhance the customer experience. For example, you can use pre-written responses to answer customers’ questions about a product or service. Or you might automate posts and publish content that is already prepared to be published at a certain time.
11. Use Social Media to Hire and Recruit Potential Employees
Social media sites like LinkedIn can help you choose from a vast majority of potential workers for your business. Posting about the work environment and company culture is already enough to garner the attention of people who are trying to find work.
With the large pool of users, you are bound to find someone that can fill a role in your business.
Finally…
Social media is about personalization. It’s a way to connect with new, potential, and existing customers more deeply and personally.
It makes it easier for customers to find and connect with your business. They can find out about your products and services with just a few taps on their phones or computers.
Keeping in touch with your customers in a personal way also makes you more involved in their lives, whether it be by improving their lives through your products or sharing memes with them that make their day better.
A genuine and personal connection through your products and marketing campaigns is something you must strive for to create value in your business and your customer’s life.
For a more in-depth discussion about different marketing strategies, read this!
