Social media may have started as a way to help people to connect. Today, however, it’s a powerful way for businesses to reach consumers. Whether your business is primarily online or off, you can’t afford sitting out the social media trend.
Luckily, social media companies like Facebook offer businesses many convenient ways to target their customer base. When you take advantage of social media to improve awareness about your brand, you bring in lots of traffic and conversions. If you are to make all this happen, however, you need to do your best to expand your company’s presence on social media. What follows are ideas to help you make it happen.
Create goals to reach
Before you start enhancing your social media presence, you need to know what your goals are. Your aim may be to gain more followers, increase engagement, or create new leads. Defining the goals that you work for can help you form clear plans to get there.
Build a great profile
You need to get the basics right before you begin to implement a social media strategy. You can start by checking out your brand’s profile to see how complete it is. You need to make sure that every available field is filled in.
Write a short, attractive bio that tells the story of your brand. Make sure that you pepper your bio with a few keywords relevant to your business. Keywords can help bring in traffic. You also need to make sure that you have a great display picture and cover photo in place. Attractive images can improve your brand’s credibility, and can help retain visitors who come, making sure that they don’t navigate away.
Follow other accounts
To gain a following, you need to make sure that people see your account as a real and legitimate social media presence. Following the accounts of people and brands relevant to your business is one way to achieve legitimacy. When you follow them, many of them will return the favor and follow you. Gaining followers in this way is important to creating credibility for your account.
Interact often with your audience
Whether you’re on Facebook or Twitter, having frequent conversations with your followers is an important part of establishing yourself as a presence on social media. Make sure that you appoint someone to interact with your audience in a friendly and responsive way. The more you interact with your audience, the better established you become as a social media fixture.
Figure your audience out
Once you begin interacting with your audience, you need to try to understand them. It can help you improve the quality of your conversations. Platforms like Facebook have considerable stores of member data to help you analyze your audience to find out what they like. As you learn about your audience members, you’re able to personalize both your social media interactions and your company’s website to their needs.
Direct users from your website to your social media accounts
Every time a visitor comes to your website, it’s an opportunity to gain additional traffic for your social media accounts. You can put follow buttons and share buttons for all your social media accounts on every page on your site.
Organize events
Conducting events gives you a great opportunity to spread awareness of your brand and its associated social media accounts. Put information about your social media handles and hashtags on every sign, printed booklet, or pamphlet. The more creative you get promoting your hashtags, the better the response is likely to be.
Make good use of hashtags
Anytime that you post content on social media, try to attach it to a couple of hashtags. You can bring in more visitors to your social media accounts this way.
Get on more than one social media platform
You don’t need to restrict yourself to Facebook or Twitter when on social media. You can try running an active presence on a number of other social networks, as well, including ones like Pinterest.
Put social icons on your emails
Every marketing email or business email that your company puts out, you can make sure that it has a few social sharing buttons. You may gain many new visitors in this way.
Hand out freebies
When you announce freebies to anyone who comes to your social media accounts, it can prompt people to check you out. Sometimes, your freebies need to be nothing more than a coupon code for purchases on your website.
Engage with your audience
You need to engage your followers on a personal level. Monitor your social media to be alerted when someone says something about your brand on any platform. You should be there right away to thank them and say something interesting in response. You can also engage with followers who come to your social media accounts by setting up contests or surveys. When you engage with your followers, you make them feel that you plan to be around for the long haul. You build trust in this way.
Try SEO for your social media content
Search engines can see what you put on your social media accounts. If your content has keywords connected to your business, your social media account is likely to come up when people search for those words. It’s important to optimize your social media content.
Advertise offline
You can advertise in newspapers or put up posters to get people to notice your social media accounts. If you have physical store locations, you can advertise your social media accounts there, as well.
Be regular posting on social media
If you don’t post enough on your social media accounts, your followers are likely to lose interest in you. If you post too often, it may seem like you’re spamming them. It’s important to post just the right amount to keep on top of your audience’s minds. On Twitter, engagement attains its highest level when you post three times a day. On Facebook, engagement begins to drop after twice-a-day postings. Once or twice a day works for Instagram.
Interact with your audience on a personal level
When you have conversations with your followers on social media, you need to make sure that you address them by name. Personalizing your conversations can help engage your followers.
Address complaints
When your customers have complaints about your company that they bring to social media, it’s something everyone sees. Make sure that you address their concerns promptly, and in a professional way. It’s important to remember that unhappy customers can spread the word about their negative experience.
Invite your customers to share
It can help to offer coupon codes and other rewards to get people to share your branded hashtags among their friends. Asking existing followers to spread the word is a good way to get new followers.
Pay for promotions
You can advertise on nearly every social media platform. Advertising helps you precisely target audience members based on demographics, interests, or location. You can perform research to find out what your ideal audience looks like and go after them. Paid promotions can help you attract more page likes, get greater engagement, and clicks for your links. They tend to be affordable, as well.
If you want to expand your presence on social media, you need to be proactive. Take initiative, talk to your followers, post interesting content, and be engaging. Not only will you keep your existing followers happy, but you’ll also get new ones, as well. As your audience begins to like the way you talk, they are likely to share your posts with their own friends, expanding your reach even further.
Building a presence on social media may seem difficult at first. Once you get started, however, it can turn out to be a lot of fun.
