How important is social media? Well, according to Backlinko, upwards of 93% of internet users use social media and those users spend over 2 hours a day networking online. Furthermore, the average social media user engages on over 6 social platforms. Either your company has a proactive approach to social media within your overall inbound marketing strategy, or you’ll lose valuable market share and customers to competitors. So, to help you get with the times, here are five social media strategies you should be using.
1. Have a Complete Plan with Measurable Goals & Objectives
Come up with a complete social media plan. Identify measurable goals and objectives and itemize periods of review where you can assess your performance. Are you looking to increase customer engagement and interaction? Are you looking to build social awareness for that new product launch? Do you want to generate high-quality leads by driving targeted traffic through social media to a specific landing page? Regardless of what you aim to accomplish, just be sure your plan has benchmarks where your digital marketing team can assess their progress, or the lack thereof. Using SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals keeps you adhered your plan and focused on attainable goals, to improve your business objectives, step-by-step.
2. Focus on the Right Social Media Platforms
The days of digital marketing teams focusing solely on the number of shares and likes are long gone. Those were the days when companies were unsure of which social media channel to focus on. It was a time where every business, regardless of its market, opened a Facebook page.
Define what market you service, who your buyer personas are and what social media channels they use. A business-to-business (B2B) market is better served by professional social media channels like LinkedIn and YouTube as opposed to consumer-based sites like Snapchat, Pinterest, and Instagram. Spreading yourself too thin among too many channels may confuse your customers and make it difficult to reach your target audience.
Although, the argument can be made that you should have a presence on all social media platforms. Focusing the bulk of your efforts on the channels that your target audience uses is a solid plan. But, staking your claim with logo and contact information on all platforms means your business or brand is more searchable, potentially seen by more prospects, and allows your business to expand their social reach and engage on other platforms when the time is right. It is important to secure your preferred handles and URLs immediately, lest you find them unavailable when you finally decide you want to use them.
3. Incorporate Your Brand
An argument can easily be made that social media is one of the best customer-centric marketing tools available. However, it works when you build your brand alongside your customers. Regardless of what social media channel you use, you must incorporate your brand and logo on your company page.
All the major social media channels allow companies to include an image and link to the company’s website. You can even direct users to specific landing pages. Either way, incorporating your brand is an absolute must. This involves using the same logo, images, company description and product endorsements across all your channels.
4. Be Proactive and not Reactive
What do you hope to accomplish through social media? Most companies rarely ask themselves this question. They take a reactive approach instead of a proactive one. They assume their followers will build their brand for them. It doesn’t work. You must be an active participant in social media.
Your customers won’t work with you unless you work with them. This means developing proactive habits like checking your social media channel multiple times a day, tracking social media analytics and defining how you generate leads through your social media channel. You can’t make improvements unless you’re willing to assess your success or failure.
5. Focus on Quality
Granted, this is somewhat of an ambiguous tip. However, it’s one with far-reaching implications. So, what does it mean to focus on quality with respect to social media?
First, it means focusing on the quality of your content and not the quantity. It’s no longer about pumping out content at breakneck speeds. Instead, it’s about ensuring your content is well-written, well-researched and engaging enough for users to share. It means expanding your content beyond the written word and including videos, whitepapers, business case-studies, vivid images, and infographics. Not to mention, continually updating your existing content to stay relevant.
Second, it means building a network of like-minded individuals and professionals. It means connecting with the right people, as opposed to indiscriminately accepting anyone and everyone that wants to connect with you. This is not about how many people you’ve connected with, but instead about who you’ve connected with and how those connections can build your brand and online reputation.
Finally, it means properly managing your online reputation by providing proactive solutions for all customer complaints and then following up until those complaints are resolved. Remember, your customers build your brand with you in real-time. Upset customers have greater influence nowadays through social media and you must treat them as long-term partners.
It's no longer about just being present. Your digital marketing team must have a plan. They must come to treat and measure their social media strategy the same way they would with any of your marketing tools. That means defining what you're going after, how you'll measure your progress and when you'll alter course.
Contact us if you need help in developing a social media strategy designed to reconnect you with your market and customers. We would love to partner with you.
Written By: David Carpenter
