Today, having a social media presence is a prerequisite for every brand. But it comes with its challenges. Having a presence on social media and then trying to reach a large audience isn’t a piece of cake. But if you can create a strong presence on social media, it can help your brand grow by leaps & bounds.
How To Grow Your Business With Social Media
1. Set Your Goals
Before your brand gets an active social media profile on any social media platform for you, you need to discern what you want from social media. You wish to benefit from social media marketing, but first, you need to determine how. Whether you want to enhance your sales, create brand awareness, generate leads, expand your audience or increase traffic on your website? Deciding your goal will help you move ahead. The following are the most common reasons why businesses approach social media.
Social Media Marketers' Top Goals For Social
1
%
Increase Community Engagement
1
%
Lead Generation
1
%
Grow Brand's Audience
1
%
Increase Brand Awareness
1
%
Increase Web Traffic
1
%
Interaction With Consumers
If you know what your end goal is, it can help you decide a number of things like-
Your Content
Whether your copy will be promotional or conversant depends on the fact whether you wish to drive sales or awareness from your brand’s profile
Your Social Media Sites
Again, if you only wish to grab your audience’s attention or engage with them, you can choose a lot of platforms where your audience is. But if you wish to drive sales, social media websites with targeted ads and Shop options will work best.
Once you wish your end goal, we suggest you take the SMART approach to set smaller goals. Here SMART stands for –
- Specific – Be specific about your target. Know what you want for your brand.
- Measurable – Make sure it is measurable. You can use a social media tool for the purpose.
- Attainable – The goal should be achievable. Setting unrealistic goals will not help.
- Relevant – Your goal must have an overall positive impact on your social media presence & your brand.
- Time-bound – There should be a time-limit to finish the set goal at the end of which you will assess your progress.
2. Create Quality Content
Social media runs on content. The rule is simple, quality content means better engagement.
Unless you provide interesting content to your audience, your profile cannot get the acclaim it deserves. A major mistake that a lot of brands make is of posting a lot of promotional content on their pages. But consider this: your social media audience is already bombarded with promotional ads. Over that, the promotional posts will discourage them from following you and they will lose interest in your brand. Only 1 in every 25 promotional posts ever gets a response.
Another way in which promotional content harms you is that if someone comes up to your page & sees all the promotional posts, they might get discouraged from following you. This lowers your chances of getting many leads from social media.
What you must opt to do for your brand is to offer valuable content through your platform. Your posts should be engaging & interesting for your audience. If you directly sell to your followers, they might go. But on the contrary, if you can solve a problem for them, they will stay. Try to provide them with content they find valuable & useful and it still is valuable to your brand. This way you can gain loyal followers who might share your content as well, thus inviting more people to follow you.
The type of your content also depends on the social media platform it is going on. You need to understand the audience demographics on the top social media platforms. On websites like Instagram, where there is an audience of younger demographics, you can choose recreational content; while on platforms like LinkedIn, you must stick with a formal language keeping the platform’s demographics in mind.
1
%
Promotional Posts
1
%
Responses
3. Engage & Interact
Now that we are past the first two steps, here’s the third one. You are not just supposed to post social media posts through your page. You can do more. Social media allows you to engage & interact directly with your consumers. You can have 2-way communication with them. Engaging with your audience is an important part of having a social media presence. Doing so, you get a chance to understand your audience’s perspective of your brand & how you can connect with them more effectively.
A few ways you can engage with your audience are by answering their questions/queries or engaging in conversations with them in the comments section or personal messages on your page. This shows you as a brand that cares about your audience’s opinions. Another thing that can be done is to encourage your audience to converse with you.
Besides the regular posts, you can also post contests or Q&As on your social media page. This will encourage your followers to engage in conversation with you. You can also display user-generated content on your page & tag them to it. This way you appreciate a user, while also becoming visible to an extended audience.
Engaging with your audience comes with its own set of benefits, like-
- It gives you a chance to foster a relationship with your audience. This way they start trusting your brand.
- It helps you understand your audience, what they like or dislike about your brand. You get feedback.
- Having greater engagement can help you rank better on social media platforms, thus being visible to a wider audience.
4. Be Humane
If your consumers want to know about how good you are at your job, they would visit your website. If they follow you on social media, it means that they want to know your brand on a more personal level. And you can use this very well for your benefit. Social Media is a great way for you to share your brand’s personality with your customers. This will make them feel more connected to your brand, thus building a sense of trust in them. This can even get you some really loyal customers.
But How To Do This?
You can use your social media posts to tell your brand’s story. This way your followers would know more about you. Share your small & big achievements on your social media pages.
If you notice, on social media, even serious businesses or institutions use humour to engage with their audience. Let alone brands, even police social media handles have quirky humorous content. You can get inspired by this & post humorous entertaining content on your pages that engage your audience. But one more thing you need to keep in mind here is that you need to understand your audience for this. You need to create content that they find relatable & engaging.
1. Stand Out
When someone follows your brand on social media, you can discern that they are interested in your brand’s niche. This means that there is a very high chance that they might be following other brands of the same niche, which will be your competitors.
Now, why would this person remember your brand out of all others?
The answer is Uniqueness. If your brand stands out from all others & your posts can get hooked to his mind, he will remember you. Uniqueness & originality are two things you need to be unforgettable to your audience. Your content should be a notch above your competitors. Only then your audience would want to stop scrolling & pay any heed to it.
The first step to standing out is to analyze your competitors. You need to understand what kind of social media strategy are your competitors following. Doing a little competitor analysis can help you a long way. Understand what they do and how it is working for them. You can also take some ideas and incorporate into your work. But let it be an inspiration, not copying.
Another thing would be to research your audience, you can use an analytic tool for it. Analyzing your audience’s behaviour, determine what you like & then create posts likewise. This way you can cut through all the noise on the internet and get your audience to notice you.
2. Keep Them Interested
Here’s a survey that asked people the major reason why they unfollowed a brand on social media. Surprisingly enough, the most seemingly obvious answer, i.e. poor quality of products, ranked last. And what became the top reason was Losing Interest in the brand.
With so many brands on social media and users spending so much time there, it is very probable that your audience will lose interest in you unless you can keep them hooked. You need to make sure your audience doesn’t forget you. Because if that happens, you might lose some really potent customers. You can do it by keeping them engaged & interested in you.
Top Reasons A Brand Gets Unfollowed On Social Media
1
%
No Longer Interested
1
%
Poor Quality Of Products
1
%
Irrelevant Content
1
%
Lack Of Engagement
1
%
Posted Too Much, Too Often
1
%
False Information
1
%
Inappropriate Posts
1
%
Too Much Promotion
A Few Ways To Do This Are-
- Keep A Single Tone Throughout - People remember brands that have a consistent tone. So, try to maintain the same tone throughout your social media platforms.
- Promote Other Content On Social Media - It can be a good blog on your website or that YouTube video you got made. Promoting such content helps drive traffic to your website as well as keeps your social media audience engaged.
- Be Consistent - Keep posting frequently & don’t let your audience forget you.
- Create Amazing Content - As we mentioned before, your content is your strongest weapon on social media. So, make sure you create good quality content that is unique & interesting. This way it will stay in their mind for long.
- Organize Contests, Giveaways & Give Discounts - These can help keep you engaged with your audience.
3. Collaborate With Influencers
Influencers are the mini-celebrities of social media that made a name on the respected social media platform through their content. Influencers have a large loyal following of people in their particular niche. Now, if a good influencer can endorse your brand, you have a chance to be visible to a large audience many of which might convert.
The best part about collaborating with influencers of your niche is that you have the chance to display your brand to people interested in your niche instead of a general audience. Such people are more likely to end up following you and even convert to your consumers. In fact, 72% of companies investing in Influencer Marketing believe that the quality of customers they gained from influencer campaigns are better than other forms of marketing.
4. Improve Your Ranking
To do this, you need to incorporate some social media optimization tips to optimize your pages better on social media. One tip is to use relevant useful keywords to rank better for searches. You can do keyword research for your brand’s niche & include relevant keywords in your social media posts, captions, your bio and more.
Similarly, to rank your page better on social media, you can include relevant hashtags in your posts. Doing so increases your chances to be visible on relevant hashtag search on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. But make sure you don’t spam your posts by putting too many hashtags in your posts. This can work against you.
5. Drive Traffic
We know we’ve been telling you to not use social media for sales. But actually, you can enhance your sales using social media. Around 51% of social browsers use social media to research products. This means that a lot of people are using social media to look for products. Now, if done right, you can use this to your brand’s benefit & enhance sales. Using social media can be a great way to drive organic traffic to your website.
But this cannot be done with promotional posts. Instead, you need to try other methods like-
- You can include CTAs in your pages & posts. This can be your website’s link in your bio and prompts in captions to visit you. This acts as a way of nudging your audience to take action.
- You can use social media advertisements to advertise your products. Advertisements like Facebook Ads are highly targeted and help you reach the people who are more likely to buy.
6. Monitor Your Results
Lastly, after everything is done, you need to assess the results of your social media strategy. This helps you in deciding whether or not your present strategy is working & how you can work on your weak points to strengthen your strategy. To analyze your results, you can use analytical tools easily available online.
You need to scrutinize your results to ensure you know what is or isn’t working for you. You also need to keep an eye on the trending content & posts that might help you stay ahead of the curve. This you can do by doing a thorough competitor analysis. Understanding your mistakes will help you come up with a strong strategy that will help your social media pages flourish.
Social Media Stats That Brands Should Know
1
%
Follows A Brand
1
%
Purchase From Brand They Follow
1
%
Do Products Research
1
%
Rely On Social Media To Make Purchase Decisions
As easy as these tips might sound, creating a strong social media presence is a hard task. A lot of things have to be considered right from developing a strong social media strategy to deciding content. It is a cumulative effect of a number of factors. And it is often difficult for brands to do this on their own. This is why they seek the help of social media marketing experts like us. We understand how social media works and thus are capable of predicting what can work for brands. We can help brands reach their audience on social media, in the most lucrative way possible. And it all starts with a tiny step.
We hope you found these tips useful & if any questions pop in your mind on this subject, feel free to drop them in the comments section below. You can also write to us at hello@walnutfolks.com. Our team of experts will get back to you as soon as possible.