Growing your company’s social media channels from scratch isn’t easy. It takes effort and hard work.
If you’re willing to invest the time, these tips can help you grow your following, increase website traffic, build lasting relationships with your target audience, and ultimately establish your presence in the market.
The potential return on your social media marketing can help enhance your brand’s position and even increase revenue.
It’s worth it for sure, but make sure you have the time and staff to make it happen before you kick things off.
Social media isn’t something your company should invest in part-time. You should be fully invested if you decide to get involved with social media.
Now, let me just step down off of my soapbox for a second. Since you’ve decided to move forward and take the leap into social media, here are some tips to help you go all in and boost your social media presence.
Table of Contents
Know your audience
Perhaps the most effective way to boost your social media presence is to truly understand your audience and post with their interests in mind.
If you’re posting content that’s of value to your followers, your chances of building a loyal following that looks forward to reading (and sharing) your posts increase significantly.
Take time to create buyer personas for each of the different personalities in your audience. These personas can then be used to ensure you’re creating content that connects. Here are a few things you should add to each persona.
- Fictional name
- Job title, role, and responsibilities
- Demographics (age, education level, income, etc.)
- Professional challenges and goals
- Personal challenges and goals
- Preferred content types and distribution channels
- Family and social life
- Technology use
The more detailed you get, the more each persona mimics your actual audience. This allows you to craft content more effectively with the right message, the right tone and voice, and the right style. Content that connects is content that gets shared.
Be consistent
Inconsistent and infrequent posting can have a negative impact on your brand. Staying consistent helps your target audience connect more easily with your brand, making your brand more recognizable when people land on one of your pages, even across different channels.
Start by doing some research upfront and putting together a plan that includes the following:
- A message that connects with your target audience
- Channels your audience uses (you don’t have to target all of them)
- Where will your focus be (which channels)?
- The optimal amount of posts per day (this varies by channel)
- Times and days where posts perform best (again, it varies by channel)
- Content mix (your content, sales content, outside content…how much of each?)
- Tools and resources (people and tech) available to execute your plan
Your plan should include some additional info, but to stay on the topic of consistency, the 7 bullets above are critical to make consistency, in particular, happen. Beyond the list above, here’s a great article on the Hootsuite blog that highlights 8 steps to build a social media strategy.
Use technology
Speaking of Hootsuite, many great technology platforms are available to simplify the processes of scheduling posts and engaging with your followers.
Utilizing technology helps you stay consistent, it can also help your social media team with activities like scheduling posts ahead of time, searching for brand mentions, keeping tabs on related conversations, and getting involved with your community.
Here are a few great tools I recommend testing out:
- Hootsuite: This is a great tool with both free and paid versions. You can schedule your posts, collaborate with team members, monitor mentions, review analytics and much more.
- Social Champ: Not only is this an excellent platform and our go-to for scheduling content, but the CEO is also super accessible, making this channel an excellent resource as you’ll always have transparency into what’s happening.
- Scoop.it: Finding relevant content to post on your social channels can be difficult. A tool like Scoop.it can help make it easy to locate high-quality content that’s in line with what your audience wants to see.
- Quuu: Quuu is another content curation tool, but one additional thing I really like about this is the ability to promote your own content. It comes with a fee, but you can choose a select post (or posts) and promote it (or them). In turn, other Quuu users will be prompted to share the content on their own channels.
- AgoraPulse: Understanding what content is performing best is critical to your social media success. This platform helps simplify that task and allows you to pinpoint which content is working and which isn’t.
Be social and engage
Being successful with social media isn’t about posting and hoping for the best. To be successful and achieve the results you want, your brand needs to be actively engaged. This means listening to what your audience is saying and even getting involved in the conversation.
- Take some time each day to monitor what’s being said about your brand.
- Dig into what posts are being shared, liked, and commented on.
- Get involved by replying to posts that mention you or comments on your company’s posts.
Engaging with your audience shows you’re actively listening and helps your content reach further.
Find the curation vs. creation sweet spot
Coming up with the amount of content necessary to keep your social media followers engaged can be challenging.
That’s just one of the reasons why I (and many of the leading minds on the subject matter) recommend posting around 75% curated content vs. 25% created content.
Think about it this way. Let’s say your company posts 5 times daily on Twitter, 2 times daily on Facebook, and 3 times per week on LinkedIn.
Coming up with enough content to fill those spaces shouldn’t be too hard if you have a huge team and a sizeable budget, but for most businesses, that’s not the case.
Curating your content can help you push out enough content to keep your followers coming back for more, and it can also help in the following ways.
- Shows you’re in touch with latest best practices in your industry
- Helps you connect with and engage thought leaders (aka influencers)
- Makes you appear more informative and less self-promotional
- Adds value for your followers and gives them a reason to return
- Mixes nicely with your created content that drives clicks back to your site
Getting started
Before jumping headfirst into any of the above activities, ensure you have your team in order.
Everyone should understand their role and have what they need set up for success. Then, get your strategy ironed out and ensure everyone is on board.
Once you have that in place and your team is ready, you’re all set to start boosting your social media presence and creating positive ROI from your social media marketing efforts!
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