By Katie Mientka
Everyone is on social media. Your best friend from elementary school, your coworkers, your grandma. Your customers and competitors. It can be a powerful way to connect, build your brand, and tell a compelling story. If you are not seeing the results you want and need, try these three easy steps to improve performance:
1. Think Quality Over Quantity
We have an insatiable appetite for social content; Facebook alone, for example, has 2.41 billion active monthly users, and 1.59 billion log in everyday, spending an average of 20 minutes on the site. But at the same time, when you post for the sake of posting — cluttering up their feeds with fluff or irrelevancy, they’ll either scroll right past or unfollow your business.
Create high-quality, meaningful content for every post. This is far more critical than posting every day (or as some brands do, multiple times a day). While there is more than enough fluff (and cat memes), people are also using social media for substantive discussions, information, and research. Whether you share a link to a helpful article on your website or carefully curated from an authoritative source, post a clear, compelling picture of your team, think about your content from the point of view of your followers: will they like it, share it, comment? Would you if you were in their place?
2. Cross-Promote
Make sure that all of your social media platforms (and your website) are integrated. For instance, when you post a video on YouTube, add your website link to the description and add social buttons so viewers can easily share to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., or via email. Links not only allow your prospects and customers to easily navigate your web presence, it benefits your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts
Don’t forget to link your online presence with your offline presence: Add links to social profiles on your invoices business cards, and other marketing collateral; if you’re at a trade show or industry event, invite people to like your page(s). You can even incentivize it if you want (e.g. a discount, exclusive content, etc.) for those who do.
3. Be… Social
It’s amazing (and not a bit ironic!) that the social aspect of social media is often neglected by brands. Interact with your community. It is as simple as starting to respond to those who comment on your page or seeing where you’ve been tagged and participating in that conversation.
Show an interest in those who follow you and in your space in general. On Instagram, for example, you can use the Explore page to find content that aligns with your likes and follows. Follow, like, and comment on these relevant pages to begin building a more extended network.
You’ll get follow-backs from those who are genuinely interested. Again, this is great for both creating a strong social presence and a cohesive SEO approach.
Bonus Step: Test
If at first you don’t succeed… figure out why. Consider adjusting the days or time of day you post; analyzing which posts perform best and creating more of that type of content; seeing which posts are underperforming and shifting your strategy. It takes time to build a solid following, so don’t make changes before you have some solid analytics with which to work.
Social media is a tremendous force, and when you leverage its potential, you can build trust, relationships, and authentic connections. You can also build your business!
Need help? Haven is here to take away the pains and frustrations of marketing so you can tell your story of expertise — in a way that resonates with your prospects and customers.
