Would you like to grow your reach in a thoughtful and meaningful way?
With the explosive growth of social media as a marketing tool, moving beyond traditional marketing is a must.
Gone are the days of marketing silos. Today a business must maintain an integrated and cross-channel marketing strategy to succeed.
Social media offers you that ability.
If you’re eager to build a substantial social media presence that supports sustainability, the steps below will help you get there.
6 Steps to Improve Your Social Media Presence
1. Identify Goals and Objectives
Have you identified why you’re on social media? If not, success will always feel out of reach.
Take the time to know what you hope to gain from social media and what you have to offer.
It’s a noisy online world. The last thing you need to do is to simply hop on without a clear appreciation of your overall goals.
The best way to do this is to spell out your goals and objectives. In other words, what are you looking to gain and why is it important to your business?
Use a worksheet like the one below from Exact Target to get specific. Clearly state your “what” and “why” and don’t get caught up in the how just yet.
The important part of this process is to analyze and brainstorm.
2. Humanize Your Business or Brand
Social media has the amazing ability to humanize your brand. You can put a face, voice and personality behind your online persona.
While there’s no replacement for face-to-face relationship building, social media can give consumers the insight they need to connect with your business online. The key to successfully showing people the human side of your business is to offer unique insight.
How can you do this?
- Share exclusive features about your business
- Events in your local community
- Behind the scenes pictures of your team
- Stories about your “why” and what it means to customers
- How you solve customer problems
- What customers can expect from you and your company
- Share your thoughts on trending topics within your industry
- Sign your tweets or posts
Social Media Examiner uses that last tactic consistently. Whoever is responding or posting signs their name. This lets you know that there’s a real person behind that content.
17 Reasons You Need to Rethink Your Facebook Strategy http://t.co/TcdwwfdqEt by @Hootsuite – Erik pic.twitter.com/ScdYssHgMF
— SocialMediaExaminer (@smexaminer) July 20, 2014
People want to do business with people. They also want to do business with people they know, like and trust.
Give them the chance to get to know you and the human side of your brand.
3. Understand Your Audience Needs
Whether you’re marketing to consumers or business professionals, share the details that matter most to them.
From common everyday solutions to detailed instructions, take your knowledge and translate it into useable and valuable social media content.
Want to know who your target market is and what they’re looking for? Use a tool like BuzzSumo to get inside their head.
What are they talking about and what content is shared at a rapid pace? Buzzsumo will show you the most popular topics and content based on any given search.
For example, you’re a pet trainer and want to see:
- What your competition is talking about
- What your potential clients are sharing
Run a search based on “how to train my dog” and you now see the top search results based on social shares and relevance.
4. Create an Integrated Social Media Strategy
Social media is not a one-off tactic. Ensure that each of your social properties is tied into your overall marketing strategy.
This means that each spoke or social media channel serves a purpose, working together to support a long-term plan.
How to Get Started
Begin with a marketing calendar. From a high level, this will include all company events, activities, awards, special events and other yearly highlights.
It will also include research that spells out your upcoming blog and social media content.
From there you will detail how each of your social channels will syndicate your content. For example, how will Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram allow you to tap into previously untapped sectors?
How often will you post and how will each social site tell your story and allow your online presence to grow?
HubSpot’s free editorial calendar is a great place to start building your marketing calendar!
5. Engage Your Community (and do it often)
Did you know that seven out of ten consumers prefer to work with a business that has a solid social media presence?
Unfortunately for most, the opposite is true.
According to a recent survey by Deluxe, 70 percent of small businesses spend less than one hour per week maintaining their online presence, with 51 percent posting to social media only once a month or less.
Add to that the fact that over 27 million pieces of content created each day and you have to wonder how your message will break through the noise?
While you might be tempted to use social media as a bullhorn, you’d miss the bigger opportunity.
Creating an engaged community is a give and take. This means you share your content, other people’s content and then get involved in the conversation.
Be proactive, responsive and truly interested.
It’s not enough to just be interesting. If you can’t captivate and fascinate, you won’t keep them coming back for more.
Use Social Media To:
- Connect
- Engage
- Ignite
- Inspire
6. Optimize Your Social Media Accounts
Don’t overlook the power of social media optimization.
Consumers often use keyword-based search queries when researching your product, service or niche.
You can immediately increase visibility through the strategic use and placement of keywords within your social media accounts.
This doesn’t mean keyword stuffing, but rather an organic and conversational way of letting customers know what you do.
The Goal is To:
- Optimize for human consumption
- Optimize for SEO
- Optimize for SMO
- Optimize based on keywords
Final Thoughts
Building a powerful social media presence takes time and won’t happen overnight.
Tweaking your approach isn’t enough. You must commit to putting in the energy and hours as well.
What steps have you taken to improve your social media efforts and increase your results?
I agree with what you mention in this article, apart engaging effectively with your customers, one should also make it easier for customers to find you and also find out what other people are saying about you. This is why it’s strongly advisable to increase your online presence as much as possible. One website I strongly suggest for business services is TheWorkster.com. It’s a completely free website which allows you to post your business services along with description, photos, contact details and other details.
You cease to amaze me Rebekah. I like how you keep your “evergreen” content in my G+ Stream alive and well.
Hi Rebekah,
Knowing Your Audience Needs… So many people miss this one out!
Great list. Bookmarked
Naomi
So true Naomi and such a critical part of succeeding online!
Great tips here rebekah. I would agree with Ryan’s comments about infographics and other multimedia content. I am finding that infographics are great for engagement. I think that because we are all very visual people these are particularly attractive.
Fantastic article Rebekah – it’s one of the most thorough I’ve read about social media. I’m definitely going to check out the hubspot editorial calendar as I’ve been meaning to sort a calendar out for so long. It’s just sadly been stuck on my to-do list!
Thank you Lauren! You’ll really like the Hubspot calendar. It’s very thorough and simple to use!
Hi Rebekah,
All the tips rock of course, 5 is pure gold.
I started a new Blogging From Paradise Page on Facebook yesterday and already have 70 organic Likes, just from asking my friends…..AND….from engaging immediately.
I’m responding to every update Like, or comment, or message, and I’ve seen a handful already. This does a few thing; it lets people know you’re not asleep at the wheel and it also informs people that you’re there, you’re active and you are listening too.
If you’re active, and engaging, people will return to see your valuable, helpful updates, and they’ll chat with you again. Good social is more like a party than a profile or page, where people get together to chat, socialize, and share their take on the status updates you’re sharing.
I’d add that posting eye candy is a wonderful way to draw in folks who are apt to become rabid fans and brand advocates. My travel pictures – especially shots from here in Fiji – are getting more Likes and pub as we speak, and InfoGraphics or any other bright, shiny form of multi media will force folks to take notice, and share their insight.
Thanks so much Rebekah, epic post.
I’ll be sharing through Triberr now.
Have a great day!
Ryan
You make so many great points Ryan! If you truly take an interest in people, they will eventually take an interest in you. As I said above, it’s not enough just to be interesting. You have to be interested in what other people have to say.
So often we get caught up in the marketing of our own business, we don’t stop to hear what others are saying. There’s so much we can learn if we just take the time to interact and engage others.
I’m not surprised to hear the amount of shares your beautiful pics are receiving. People love to live vicariously and those pics do the job. Plus, they’re a great way to allow anyone following you to better understand who you are, what you do and why you do it.
You’ve presented some excellent tips to improve our social presence Rebekah!
Understanding the requirements of followers is the key point and hence we should offer the needed data in a consistent manner. This will definitely help to get a good social presence and I’ve experienced this before. I’ll try to follow your other ideas as well, thanks for writing the executable social media tips and I hope that these would enhance our social activities.
Hi Nirmala! Understanding the needs of your community is the difference between targeted content that hits the spot every time or content that’s randomly shared and not necessarily of any value to your audience. Why waste your time on the latter, right? 🙂
All good tips (again) Rebekah. One of the first things I would do if I’m considering adding a site to my Feedly reader is to Google the person’s name or their brand so I can see if I want to follow them on their other top social channels. I have a Chrome plugin that does this for a website but if I like their Tweet or their LI update or G+ post, this tactic helps me get high level view of the person’s social presence. Then again, my niche is more tech oriented than most B2C entities, so this tactic may not be universal?
I’d say it’s a great tactic no matter the industry Neil. It’s always good to know who you’re connecting with and how you can create a mutually beneficial relationship!