As a marketer or small business owner, you want to be at the forefront of marketing knowledge. You want to know and understand how to market your business so that you can make sales and continue to grow. That's SMB 101, right?
So it's important to keep a few of the social media best practices in your back pocket, so you can always stay on top of your digital marketing game. Here are a few ways to use social media to your advantage.
1. Create a content theme.
While running your social media, you want to make things as easy on yourself as possible. Come up with a content theme for each one of your platforms. Put together a pattern for the types of content you share on Facebook and Twitter, but you'll need to get a little more creative when it comes to platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
Take a look around some of your favorite Instagram feeds to see if you can use inspiration from those to put together a cohesive theme for your own Instagram. Photos that include similar colors, a pattern of images versus graphics, and three-photo series are all great options for an Instagram feed.
As for your Pinterest profile, you want to create a similar cohesive theme with your board covers. Either uploading branded graphics as your covers or coming up with a different theme is the perfect way to brand your Pinterest with a content theme.
Putting together a theme helps to strengthen your brand in your online presence. It helps people to realize a post or a photo belongs to you before they even see your brand or business name or logo. This is step number one in social media best practices, and one that you definitely don't want to skip.
2. Find your brand voice.
One of the best ways to gather a large audience or community on social media is by having a humorous or relatable brand voice. However, you have to determine if that's the right direction to take for your business.
What is it that you sell? Is it something that can take a lighthearted tone without offending your customers or making your business seem less legitimate? If the answer is no, you'll likely want your brand voice to be more informational and friendly, rather than sarcastic and sassy.
Yes, we all love Wendy's Twitter feed. But it's definitely not the right brand voice for every business.
And right after you determine your content theme, you want to make sure you find your brand voice. This will be what all of your content sounds like. Funny, informative, friendly, jargon-filled, slang-filled, etc. There are so many different options, and you need to find the one that best represents your business.
3. Research your competition.
Do you want to see success online? You need to know what your competition is doing. What platforms are they on? What types of content are they posting? How many followers do they have, and how many people are regularly engaging with their posts?
If your competition is getting a lot of engagement, pay attention to what they're doing right. You want to emulate that presence in your own social media content. (But remember, your business is unique. While you should never copy exactly what a competitor does, you should realize when a business is doing something right so you can take the same steps.)
On the other hand, if your competition has an empty Facebook Page, or a Facebook Page full of posts with hardly any interaction, you need to take a deeper look to see why that is. Is the content they're sharing boring? Are they not running any ads to boost engagement? Do they not keep a consistent posting schedule?
Conduct thorough research into all of your competitors so you see both sides: the ones who are doing something right and the ones who are doing something wrong. Knowing what to look for, what to do right, and then how to improve on that is the key to having a successful digital marketing strategy and online presence.
4. Talk to your followers.
Social media got its name for a reason: you have to be social to see success. One of the reasons it's so powerful for business is because it has the potential for one-to-one conversation with your customers. What other marketing or advertising platform allows you to have direct conversations with the people who make your business thrive?
It's important to remember this in your digital marketing. You can't simply throw posts on your Facebook Page and Twitter feed shouting information to your audience and expect to see a return.
You have to treat social media in the way it was meant to be used--socially. You need to talk to your customer in each of your posts.
The best way to go about this is to start by creating a customer avatar. This means you go crazy in-depth to determine who your specific ideal customer is. Their job, their income, their behavior, interests, and demographics. Create an entire avatar for who your specific customer is.
This makes it easy for you to create content that is catered directly to your audience. If you've created an avatar for your one ideal customer, it's much easier to speak right to them.
Create content that resonates with that ideal customer. Respond directly to every comment someone leaves on one of your posts. Start conversations with like-minded and potential customers to try to nurture them into actual customers. Monitor brand mentions and be sure to interact with every single one of them. People love it when companies reach out to them, even if they realize it's just a social media manager doing their job.
Ready to start working with a company that always has the social media best practices in our back pocket? Contact us to learn more about what we can do for you!
Written By: David Carpenter
