Social media initially started as a way to connect with friends. Over time, we have incorporated it in various facets of our lives, and that has brought about a world of new opportunities that weren’t as readily available before.
While most people have a personal profile, few actually understand the tremendous effect social media can have on a business.
The hardest part is seeing the crumbs for the clues that they are.
But first, why should you have a social media profile for your business?
Quite simply, because everyone’s there. The average adult spends 2-3 hours on social media daily. That’s where their attention is, and you have the opportunity to remind them of your existence, to sell them on something, or even just make them laugh. A tweet sent to your 40,000 followers has the potential to make as much impact on your business as a billboard in a small city. You need to position your business so that it is able to take advantage of these opportunities that the modern world affords it.
You have two main addresses in the online world: your website and your social media pages. While most businesses take the effort to have best site – responsive, user friendly, SEO-tweaked – their social media does not reflect the same care and diligence.
Here are a few tips on how to put your best foot forward online this year:
1. Put a Solid Social Media Strategy in Place
The first thing you need to do is identify your goals, and then set up on the appropriate platform(s).
The average person is registered on 6-8 social media platforms, each with different offerings. Reach them where it’s most sensible and where you can make the most impact.
Do you want to create a community for interacting with your customers and getting feedback? Then Twitter and Facebook may do the trick. Maybe you wish to showcase your products in a visual and vibrant manner? Look no further than Pinterest and Instagram. Do you want to connect with a young audience who will appreciate the flashy nature of your business or products? Snapchat and Instagram are perfect. Establish your dominance as an authority figure in your sector and generate long term traffic and leads? LinkedIn, Quora, and Reddit are perfect. Then there’s YouTube for edutainment and anything audiovisual plus SEO.
Pick the platform that allows you to deliver the most value to your audience. For most businesses, 2-4 platforms should do the trick.
2. Publish Quality Content Only
Attention is the most valuable thing people can give you on social media. And with so much alluring content vying for users’ attention, the worst mistake you can do is be boring.
Visitors of your social pages usually judge the quality after only a cursory glance. You need to have content that grabs them at first sight, and then drives them to engage with it (likes, comments, shares). Only by consistently doing this will you ensure the growth and success of your social media efforts.
The first step of quality control is to post more of what your followers actually like. Lots of people fall into the trap of posting what they personally like, what they think their audience likes, or what they think they should like.
Instead keep the focus on your audience: if they have engaged more with a certain type of content in the past, make more content of similar style, and instead of posting more of what has historically not worked as well, test other types of content or styles of delivery.
You need to stay fresh; even a jaw-dropping stunt performed a hundred times starts to feel stale.
VRIN Scores
A handy tool I use to judge the quality of content is the VRIN score. Typically, you want your posts to have the following:
Value: a relatable post that adds value (educational, entertainment, etc.)
Rarity: includes things most people don’t usually see or experience
Inimitability: how hard is it for someone else to copy your post?
Non-substitutable: no other place to access the information your post delivers.
Rate the content for each category on a scale of 0-10 and only post the pieces that have an average score of 8 and above, keeping in mind that posts with photos and video get 60-80% more engagement than text-only posts.
3. Promote your Content
Social media advertising is still fairly young and I believe we are yet to see its full impact because most people don’t understand it or see the opportunity. If you’re still a skeptic, take a look at a few success stories of Facebook Ads to give you some perspective.
Most of the social media sites/apps today have an ad platform built in to them, and although they may vary in terms of what content you can actually sponsor and their methods of delivery, the one thing they all have in common is their most powerful feature that gives them the leg over traditional advertising means: targeting.
Quite simply, you can describe the ideal person you want your ad to reach – from their age, location, gender, hobbies, interests, all the way to their spending habits, household size, income level and locations they frequent – and the platform helps you to reach them directly.
The beauty of working with your ideal customer in mind is you can increase the effectiveness of your ad by creating content bespoke to them and none of your precious ad money has to be wasted on irrelevant leads.
And did I mention how cheap they are? You can create ads from as little as $1 per day on Facebook. Just think about that: you can meet your ideal customers for the same price as a cup of coffee.
Compare that to the thousands you’d have to fork over for advertising on TV, radio and billboards.
But it is not as simple as boosting a post on Facebook or Instagram — there are plenty of pitfalls. Sure, the Ads Manager is fairly easy to use, but if you don’t understand what you are doing, there is a possibility of wasting your money. Especially if you don’t do your targeting research properly. I don’t recommend simply starting on Facebook ads without some form of training beforehand or a knowledgeable person guiding you through it.
The topic of social media advertising is fairly broad, and deserves an article of its own…
4. Use Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs)
Say you’ve followed all the steps to creating content with a high VRIN score, and you finally have this juicy piece you want to share with the world… well, what action do you want them to take after consuming it? Do you want them to visit your site? Take a survey? Leave a comment? Subscribe to your channel/blog? Sign a petition? Follow/Like your page? Share the post? Ultimately, you have to ask them to. Embed it within your content, and prompt them to do so repeatedly. It may sound simple and obvious, but your goal may not always be obvious to some people, and you don’t want to take the chance of losing a prospect. Grab them while you have their attention.
When placing social media ads, one doesn’t have to think about CTAs much since you’re always prompted by the platform to include one. The same habit should carry on to your regular posts. Start them with command verbs such as “buy”, “order”, “download”, “watch”, “find out how” and ensure they stand out from the rest of the content. You can also use discrete measurements of time in your CTA to drive up some urgency. Phrases like “Start your trial today” and “call now” give the user an understanding of how easy and immediate the action will be.
5. Other hacks
A few last tricks to make your life easier:
Use #hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to get your content beyond your followers. You can jump on popular hashtags that already have lots of engagement to get more exposure. Keep your head up for seasonal hashtags such as #HalloweenCostume and #ValentinesFever at their relevant times. You can also create a hashtag specific to your brand and promote it across all your marketing campaigns: consider Coca-Cola’s #TasteTheFeeling.
Post consistently
You need to be consistent with your posts. An active profile not only gets you in front of your followers constantly, some social media platforms like Instagram actually reward their frequent users with more exposure – accounts that post daily get up to 40% more likes than those that post periodically. My recommendation is at least two posts daily on all your active profiles. Two posts daily are a manageable number that you can be consistent with, but it’s not always so simple. Sometimes work gets in the way, and you’re too busy actually working on your business to worry about posting on Facebook. Luckily, there’s apps like Buffer and Hootsuite that allow you to schedule your posts at a time. Maybe just take two hours on the weekend to plan out your content for the next week or month and schedule it. Then go about your busy work life while your social life runs smoothly behind the scenes.
Closing word
Getting followers is actually quite easier than it seems. Retaining them is harder. You want to keep your engagement levels up, and to do that you need to regularly post content that your audience engages with, and then actually interact with them. Reply to all their comments on your post (or as many as possible), promptly respond to their messages, and make them feel valued. Let them know that you cherish them, not simply as clients, but as human beings too.
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If you are curious about the various opportunities available to your business and how your business can leverage them for success, kindly fill out this short form and I will get back to you as soon as I can.