There are currently an estimated 3.397 billion active social media users. It’s safe to assume that many of your customers are among this group. Thus, remembering that you need to be where your customers are, you need to be sure that you not only have a social media presence, but that you’re executing a proper strategy to keep your customers engaged and informed.
Earlier this week, I published a post detailing a few tactics to avoid within your social media marketing strategy. As a 2-part series, this second installment will focus on the things that you should be doing.
Complete Your Profiles
One of the biggest mistake’s businesses can make is not completely filling out their social media profiles. If you’re taking the time to implement a social media strategy, do it right. Be sure to completely fill out all of your information on each and every channel. Your social-savvy customers will likely visit your page at some point or another to gather a piece of information. It could be your hours of operation, phone number or web address.
As a business owner, you need to make sure that all of this information is prevalent on your page. You should also have photos and videos highlighting your products and services. A picture is worth a thousand words, and your customers want to see and understand what value our offering them as opposed to a competitor, so show it to them through photos and videos.
Know Your Audience
In order to know what types of content to post, you need to know and understand the consumers within your audience. Take the time to compile the data of your followers. Where do they live? Are they male or female? What are their interests? What are their likes and dislikes? These are all questions that must be answered.
Most social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer audience insights and other analytics to help you understand your followers better. If you want to learn more than what’s offered, you can always survey your customers to learn more about them by asking specific questions.
Be Unique and Original
Nothing is worse than a social media page that posts the same boring content over and over. One of the great things about social media is that it gives businesses a chance to be unique and get creative. Don’t overlook this opportunity, use it to your advantage by coming up with content that highlights your company’s personality and brings out the best aspects of your brand.
Use your social media pages to highlight what sets you apart from your competitors. Create and publish content that’s unique and memorable.
Share Content
Along with creating your own original content, you should also be sharing content that’s relevant and informative to your business. For instance, if you’re operating a bakery and plan to release a line of gluten-free cupcakes, you might want to post an article from an outside source that discusses the basics of gluten-free baking, or how to be successful when attempting gluten-free baking. Remember, sharing is caring.
Learn the Best Times to Post
Timing is an incredibly important component of any social media strategy. In order to ensure that your content is viewed by the most possible people within your target audience, you need to experiment with posting times. Determine which times are generating more engagement than others.
Ask yourself, should I be posting in the morning, afternoon or at night? What day(s) of the week should I post, and what kinds of content should I post on those days? You can also create a checklist of sorts to help guide you through this process, as well as to make sure that your content is free of grammatical errors, has valid links and is available to be shared by your followers should they choose to.
