So, you’ve begun the deep dive into social media for your business. You’ve painstakingly trawled through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn and set up profiles for your business. But what do you do now? How do you boost your social media presence to a point where it starts to pay off?
That’s where we come in. This handy guide will take you through the steps you can take to improve your business’ presence on social media and why this is so important.
Why Should You Boost Your Social Media Presence?
Social media is a global phenomenon. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who isn’t on some form of social media. Because of the amount of people that live a large portion of their lives on social networks, it is likely that your business’ audience is on there too. Having a fully-engaged, boosted social media presence is a fantastic way for you to reach that audience.
Plus, social media can do wonders for your SEO efforts. Creating brilliant and engaging content through social media channels can give you huge backlink opportunities. The brand awareness that comes with having an active social media presence can improve your business’ branded searches while you’re building more of an audience. The potential for increased click-through rates can affect your rankings positively.
Convinced? Then buckle up and read the tips and tricks below so that you can go from having a dull and unimpressionable existence on social media to having an outstanding, fully-functional, and active presence across all social media platforms.
Set Goals and Objectives
One of the first things you should do when you decide to embark on a social media strategy is to set and outline your goals and objectives. Without these, how do you know what you’re aiming for, or what you’d like to achieve?
Plan your goals as you see fit, whether that’s a plan that stems from weeks, to months, to years, or a small plan to reach 1,000 followers within 3 months. Whatever you would like to achieve, make sure you’re targeting something that you can quantify and keep it in mind throughout the process.
Identify Your Audience
You must identify the audience you want to target and plan your social media strategy around them. Think about your customers, what they would like to see, and what social media platforms they are interested in. Do they like Instagram and Facebook or do you think they’re more suited to LinkedIn and Google+? Wherever they are, find them and cater your content to appeal to them.
Complete and Optimise Your Profiles
Once you know which social media platforms to focus your efforts on (even if that’s all of them), you must make sure that your profiles are completed, optimised, and updated when necessary.
You need to make your brand consistent and use company logos, colours, and a style of voice that suits your business. Include relevant information in your Twitter bio and include links to your website on your Facebook page. Make sure that your audience can easily find your accounts and can get relevant and accurate information such as the business’ address, phone number, and website.
Create Engaging Content
Here comes the fun part. Content is King in the world wide web, so one of the essential aspects of boosting your social media presence is to create engaging content for your audience. Keep a good balance of promotional and useful content so that you keep your audience hooked.
Get as creative as you like and use humour, tips, and helpful information. Ultimately, creating great content on your social media platforms is going to increase clicks, likes, shares, and followers.
Interact With Others
While it’s important to spend time on your own posts and other content, don’t forget to interact with other businesses and your customers. Liking and sharing other people’s content, or interacting with them in some other way, is a great way to boost your social media presence.
Doing this will help you become a known, familiar presence on social media within your industry.
Include Links to Your Work
Also, don’t forget to include links back to your work. After all, it is getting more business that you’re trying to achieve isn’t it? Use social media as a tool to help share samples of your excellent work. Got a new product? Share it. Written an interesting blog post that outlines your service? Post it.
Just make sure you’re not pushing too much promotional content so not to dissuade your audience.
Post Regularly
To stay an active member of the social media community that relates to your business, it is important to post regularly. But, don’t take on more than you can handle. Sometimes, rather than posting sporadically, it is better to post consistently at a comfortable rate.
To make this easier, you can use social media management systems, such as Hootsuite, so that you can easily manage all of your social media accounts and schedule posts.
Use Photos and Videos
While you’re posting, clicking, and liking away at your profiles, remember that you can use photo and video content to create more interesting posts. This is a great way to spice up your feed and will help to further engage and entertain your audience.
Make Use of Social Media Tools (Live, Stories, Hashtags)
Another way to help boost your presence is to make use of the tools available to you on each of the social media platforms. You could use Facebook live, Instagram stories, and one of the most important tools: hashtags.
Regularly using hashtags in each of your posts will help people to easily find your content. For example, if a Digital marketing company, like Colewood, hashtags #DigitalMarketing, a social media audience can easily find their content and their accounts when they search for or click on that hashtag. They will also see posts from others who use the same hashtag, which is why it’s important to use ones that suit your company and audience.
Be True to Your Brand
Make sure you don’t get too caught up in the exciting world of likes and shares and forget who your business is. Stay true to your brand with every post and every photo. That is the most important thing after all.
Track Your Progress
Make sure all of your social media efforts don’t go unnoticed. Track your progress throughout the process so that you can see which posts are the most popular, how quickly your follower count goes up, and how much more traffic your website is gaining from social media.
Refer back to your goals and reward yourself when you’ve achieved them.
Boosted Posts and Advertising
If you’re willing to spend a little bit of money, you can always try boosted posts and advertising. An example of sponsored/boosted posts is the Facebook boosted post. This is simply a post from your page that, for a fee that you decide, will appear more prominently on your audience’s feed. This can be an extremely effective way to boost your social media presence, as your content will potentially reach many more people.
Advertising on social media is also a way that you can use the popularity of social networks to help your business. Think of this as instead of advertising using old-fashioned methods such as on billboards and in newspapers, you’re advertising your business to the huge online community on social media.
Phew, now that we’ve covered all that, you’re ready to put these tips to the test and you can watch your social media presence grow. If you need any more help and advice with your business’ social media, get in touch with the team at Colewood to see how we can help.
