Why Social Media Matters

Social media marketing plays a crucial role in growing your brand and reaching a wider audience.  With billions of active users on various platforms, social media has become essential for businesses to connect and engage with their target audience.  However, gaining more followers and boosting your brand’s visibility on these platforms is not easy.  You must decide your primary goals before investing the time and money necessary to grow quickly.

Choosing The Best Platform For You

Not all social media platforms are the same, and each has unique features, user demographics and content preferences. To maximize your social media marketing efforts, it's essential to identify the platforms that your target audience frequents and focus your resources on these channels. Not everyone can or should be TikTok famous.

Optimize Your Profiles

An optimized social media profile helps build a professional and consistent brand. Always use high-quality, professional images or logos that meet the platform's size requirements. Inexperienced brand managers often overlook profiles. The premium real estate on a profile can make a major difference in portraying your brand. Once a logo or image has been chosen, use the same image on all social media platforms and, in the case of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google My Business, use the same cover image as well. Preferably the cover image should match the hero image of your home page.

Entertain Or Educate

The key to a successful social media marketing strategy is creating content that attracts and retains your audience's attention. The only share-worthy content entertains or educates the user; ideally, it does both. You must provide value to attract and retrain users. Although you may have valuable things to say, the images are what will initially stop someone from scrolling past you in their feed. Use a mix of content formats, such as images, videos, articles and infographics, to cater to different audience preferences. After weeks of consistent posting, use the platform's insights to determine what type of posting your followers respond to and like the most.

Video Killed The Photo

A moving image is going to get more attention than a static one. Instagram Reels and TikTok videos have gained immense popularity because of the ability to capture and retain users.  Attention spans are 3-8 seconds for most audiences. Video content with audio on social media is the most powerful tool for capturing attention. Unlike static images, videos use motion and sound to create a more engaging and immersive experience that keeps viewers interested and engaged for longer periods of time.

Post Consistently & Strategically

Posting consistently on social media platforms is crucial to maintain your audience's interest and stay top-of-mind. However, it's also essential to strike a balance between posting frequently enough to stay relevant and not overwhelming your audience with too much content. Develop a social media content calendar to plan and schedule your posts in advance. This strategy is critical to avoid missing important dates for your audience. For example, an ice cream store would benefit from posting on September 22nd as it is National Ice Cream Cone Day. Using national awareness days and holidays allows you to hop on trending hashtags like #IceCreamConeDay that may be relevant to your brand.

Engage Actively

Frequent engagement is crucial for building a solid and loyal community on social media. Make an effort to respond to comments quickly, answer questions and participate in conversations related to your brand or industry. As your follower count grows, you may consider asking open-ended questions to encourage discussions to gather insights from your audience. Another strategy is to host polls, quizzes or contests to boost engagement and generate user-generated content. Follow and collaborate with influencers, industry experts or complementary brands to cross-pollinate your reach and tap into new audiences.

Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags and keywords are crucial in improving your content's discoverability on social media platforms. You can choose to add every relevant hashtag to a post or select only a few hyper-specific hashtags. Use a mix of branded and non-branded hashtags to increase your content's reach while maintaining brand consistency. If you want to test the efficacy of a group of keywords, post the same content twice with different keywords and hashtags simultaneously and use insights to determine which is more effective.

Post On Every Platform

Instagram and TikTok are often the platforms of choice for companies that sell products instead of a service. For companies that sell services, other platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn may be a better choice. Regardless of your primary social media platform, put all posts on each platform so your audience can reach you regardless of their social media channel preference. Sharing your Instagram posts on IG Stories, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google My Business posts will drive traffic from one platform to another. Cross-sharing on social media channels may also help your website positing in search.

Analyze & Adjust

Regularly monitoring your social media marketing performance is essential to identify the best marketing tactics for your brand. Weekly analysis is imperative to be able to make data-driven adjustments to your strategy. Use platform-specific analytics tools or third-party solutions like Sprout Social, Hootsuite Zoho Social or Google Analytics to track your audience demographics, engagement patterns and content performance. Identify the types of content, posting times and engagement tactics that generate the highest ROI and optimize your strategy accordingly.

Post, Interact & Strategize

Social media is meant to be social. Young brands grow by consistently providing entertaining or educational content and following and interacting with other users. Liking other content, engaging with other feeds and posting consistently will net results much quicker than expecting your content to stand on its own. By implementing these strategies and tactics, you can effectively grow your organic followers and improve your brand's presence on social media platforms. Social media marketing is not a full-time job for a small business but it is something that needs to be maintained daily. A mistake many companies make is handing social media posting off to a low-level employee without a strategy or understanding of a brand's message. The quality of your followers is more important than the quantity, as engaged and loyal followers are more likely to convert into customers and brand advocates. Focus on building meaningful connections, providing value and engaging with your audience to achieve long-term success in your social media marketing endeavors.