6 Ways to Create Buzz on Social Networks
People are obsessed with social media. There’s no doubt about it. New data shows that the average user is on social media 1.72 hours a day, according to Adweek. That’s 28% of all time spent online. If you’re not on social media, you’re seriously missing out on spending quality time with your customers. And if your competition is connecting with your audience on their social networks, you could be losing customers every day.
Though investing time in social media for your business may sound strange at first, it’s not. Roughly 81% of small and medium-sized businesses use social media, according to Mashable. It’s proven to be extremely lucrative for tons of different kinds of businesses in many ways.
First of all, it increases your brand awareness. If you’re regularly posting on social media, your followers and fans will see your name every day so that you’re always top of their mind. You’ll also be able to offer them better customer service, with instantaneous responses and solutions.
The most important part of social media, however, is relationship building. Social media allows you to connect with your customers in a way that was impossible before. You are constantly in direct contact with customers and potential customers. As long as you do it right, you will create long-lasting relationships with them that will result in consistent conversions.
Here are some of the top ways for your business to kill it on social media.
Figure Out What Social Networks Are Right For You
Use your target market analysis to find out what social networks your audience is on and establish a presence on them. If your competitors are on a social media platform, you need to be too. If your competitors aren’t on specific platform that your customers are on, get ahead of the game and create a page or profile on them. This way, you’ll be able to start building valuable relationships with your target market and keep your brand top of mind.
You should create a business page on all of the social networks your audience uses, which is almost always Facebook and Twitter. You can interview your customers, conduct a competitive analysis and research online to find out where your audience is socializing. If your business offers more visual products or services, like a restaurant or clothing retail store, you’ll want to have a presence on Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest as well. Snapchat is another impactful and incredibly popular social media platform. B2B businesses will benefit from being active on LinkedIn.
Don’t Just Randomly Post On Social Media
Just like with content, it’s important to have a cohesive social media strategy in order for it to be successful. The first thing you should do is develop a different purpose and goal for each social media platform, giving users a reason to follow you on multiple networks. After you’ve defined a goal for each, create a social media calendar on Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel or another application to keep your posts consistent, timely and interesting.
Craft a consistent voice across all social media channels that resonates with your audience and is based on your personas. Use the data from your target market analysis to adopt your target market’s voice. Then, create a social media guide that defines the voice your staff should use on social media, rules and brand image guidelines. Make sure to create content for related holidays, commemorative months, trending events, and content that can be coupled with popular hashtags, such as #ThrowbackThursday. Every piece of content should resonate with your target market.
Crafting Your Social Media Content
Before you post anything on social media, make sure to fill out all of the profile information you can and upload a compelling profile picture and header photo to make your social profile as detailed and visually-stimulating as possible. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to add content to your calendar.
Always make sure the content that you post reflects the interests of your fans and benefits them. A good rule of thumb is to post about four non-branded pieces of content for every branded one. You should offer social-media exclusive deals as an incentive to make people follow you. You should also share your own content, such as posts from your blog, from time to time. Along with that, you should also share content that is relevant to your industry and the interests of your audience, but doesn’t revolve around you.
Post non-promotional business information, such as pictures of your office Halloween party, volunteer work and job openings. Join in on industry discussions, like #SEOChat, to establish yourself as an industry authority and gain more followers. Use hashtags whenever possible and post about trending topics to boost your reach. Make your posts short, shareable and visually appealing. You should pretty much always include a photo when you post on Facebook and, obviously, Instagram and Pinterest.
Be Social
The purpose of social media is to be social! If you’re not interacting with your fans, there’s really no reason for you to be on social media. Don’t just post your own content and never engage with your audience. You should listen, react and interact with your followers and fans on a daily basis if possible.
You can directly address any negative posts or Tweets publicly to improve your image. Thank your followers for any praise they send your way, and reach out to them if they are going through an important life event that relates to your industry.
Utilize social listening tools like Hootsuite to make sure you are staying on top of conversations about your industry and your brand. Remember to sound as human and personable as possible in all of your posts, including your conversations with your followers.
Check Yourself Every Step Of The Way
The only way to improve your social media efforts is to know how you’re doing. You need to constantly measure engagement and post performance to know what works and what doesn’t. This way, you can plan to build on the initiatives that work and create similar content, and improve or cut content that doesn’t work as well. Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics are free tools that can give you pretty good insight into your post performance.
Implement Social Media On Your Website
Make sure to include social media buttons that take users to your various social media profiles on every page of your website. You should also include social media sharing buttons on your blog posts, so that users can easily share content. Finally, utilizing social meta tags like these on your site pages will improve your conversion rates on social media by optimizing the way your URLs appear across platforms.
Just like with other types of content, don’t be afraid to take risks on social media. Social media feeds are so cluttered that only the most outstanding content will grab user’s attention and drive them to engage with it. Hiring social media marketing masters will help insure that you’re building relationships that actually go somewhere on social media.
