Are you a brand looking to create a solid social media presence? Let’s first answer why social media presence is necessary. Social media presence escalates the brand’s credibility by providing an insight into what they actually stand for, why they do what they do, and how they care about their customers.
However, creating a niche on platforms is a task for many brands, as each platform comes with its drawbacks.
Here are some great ways to elevate your brand’s social media presence using your social channels to accomplish your business goals and create a loyal customer base.
Strategy is the blueprint
Set goals about what you want to achieve through your online presence and chalk out a plan towards achieving it.
- Is it sales?
- Is it visibility?
- Is it awareness?
For example, an athletic shoe company wants to enhance the sales of casual sandals that they have to offer. The athletic shoes are popular enough, and their sales might not need a push. However, if something new is being offered, it could use a nudge. That’s when a social media campaign can come in handy. Creating a selling story around the success of an already loved product always favors the brand.
1.Brand-Consistency
Staying consistent across platforms, including logos and social media descriptions, is an excellent way to create an online identity. This builds your brand credibility and makes it easier for users to familiarise themselves with the brand. Maintaining consistent URLs also proves to be helpful in search engine results.
2.Create a Social Media Calendar
Creating a Social Media Calendar has proven to be the key to consistent results in terms of sales and visibility of a brand. Understand what social calendar your brand needs to focus on. Factor in all the important festivals, occasions, etc., and create brand campaigns around it. Establish real connections by incorporating interactive campaigns that involve user participation. Scheduling your posts across platforms is essential because users tend to cross-verify posts for better clarity. Of course, the posts could differ based on the platform, but the key message that needs to be conveyed has to be consistent.
3.Target audience for each platform
Each social media platform garners a different type of audience.
Facebook offers a broader range of people, including business and other forums/pages.
Twitter is relatively instant, trending, and witty.
Instagram is popular for short-form visual content that captures people’s attention.
LinkedIn is an avenue for business colleagues to network and discuss business-related topics.
To determine how best you can communicate with each audience, do a trial of the content created for each platform to understand how each platform fares. Throw in a mix of video, short-form video content, posts, blogs, etc. Understanding your users’ content consumption pattern is utterly essential.
4.Analytics
Never ignore the inbuilt insight tracking options provided by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Use this data to drive your goals and work towards optimizing your content. You can also use other tools to track your sales per post/video. You can also use them to analyze what other brands or content creators are saying about your company and leverage that information for the betterment of your content.
5.Adapt to trends
Adapting to trends is like the success formula. But putting your spin on it is equally important. Learning to follow trends and incorporate them in your content is very important. Assuming that you have your social calendar in place and some pre-scheduled content, it is important to revisit it and replace it or refurbish it with some trending elements. Else content gets lost in the world of other trending pieces irrespective of how high quality and relevant your content initially was. Remember, if something is trending, it is relevant whether you like it or not.
6.Social Media for Storytelling
Why have some social media handles like Humans of NY touted to be so successful today? Because people love to read stories. And if that story adds some value to their lives, it’s a bonus.
Using encouraging language in your content gets the conversation started on social media. You can achieve this by producing valuable content that doesn’t sound like a boring sales pitch. While running a campaign, steer clear from dictated storylines handed over to creators or agencies. Let them have their creative freedom to add their storytelling to a theme curated by you. This reflects the genuineness of your products as well as your brand.
7.Interact with your Social Media Audience
Ensure to continually interact with your audience and make it as personal as possible. Retweets, reposts, mentions are real conversation starters and are ways to reach a larger audience. It’s also a sign that your brand is involved in customers’ interests. Address feedback in your posts, even if it’s a plan of action for late. Let your audiences know that you’re listening to them and will be working on it, if not now but perhaps in the future. Apart from social media interaction, you can create forums for your audiences to come and talk to you about their experience with your brand.
Social media growth is directly proportional to persistence and the brand’s involvement in the process. It can be a little daunting to start with, but it assures great results once on a growth curve.
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