When it comes to marketing on the various social media platforms, everyone wants in on the action. Social media marketing, on the surface, seems like a relatively simple concept. Just create your accounts on Facebook and Twitter, then upload some content and links, and you're done. Setting up profiles and tweeting links is simple.
Building your brand, so you have a broad reach and influence in your industry is a whole different story. Having a good, or even great, social media presence can help your business grow. Unfortunately, this is really only possible if you can develop a large following and learn how to provide them with what they want.
When it comes to your company's social media presence, you've taken all the steps necessary to get your name out there. You've taken the time to set up your social media accounts on all the major sites, and you've set up a routine and are posting content on a regular basis.
You are interacting with your customers and using the various sites as an opportunity to share information about your services and products. Unfortunately, social media marketing isn't just about being consistent and posting content regularly; it's also about giving your customers the opportunities to interact with your business.
It is through this interaction that you will be able to build substantial relationships with your customers and elevate their opinion of your business.
If you are using social media in hopes of growing your business, here are five ways to elevate your presence on social media and gain the following that you need to grow your business successfully.
1. Look for Opportunities for Discussions
When you are trying to elevate your social media presence, you have to look for opportunities to engage your audience in relevant and value-added discussions. You need to ask the following questions.
What is the current hot topic in your industry?
Are their questions that are important to your customers?
For example, if you’re marketing ice cream, you might ask the following questions.
Do my customers prefer the traditional flavors like chocolate or vanilla, or do they like to get a little wild and get crazy flavors?
What process do my customers use to select the perfect scoop of ice cream?
For this type of situation, you can conduct a simple poll to get a better understanding of what the majority of your customers like. However, it can't always be about answering simple questions. Instead, you need to give your customers the chance to engage in the discussion.
Open-ended questions create better opportunities for you to participate in discussions and debates with your customers, more so than multiple-choice questions.
If you have a more complicated marketing campaign, you will have an equally sophisticated collection of topics that will provide you with the opportunity to keep your audience up and debating into the wee hours of the morning.
An added advantage is that every time one of your posts receives a comment, it increases the chances that they’ll see the next post. You want to ask questions that your customers understand enough about the topic to be able to debate.
2. Create Chat Times
The more significant your company, the more difficult it will be to connect with all your customers on a personal level. Smaller companies, however, can use the personal interactions that they have with their audience to increase customer satisfaction.
Choose one of the social media platforms and create an event or a hashtag that will give you the opportunity to chat with your customers. During the event, provide them with troubleshooting tips and provide suggestions on how to make their experience with your service or product better. Ask them to provide you with questions, being sure to give them serious and thoughtful answers.
Setting up specific times to chat with your customers is a great customer interaction strategy because it gives your audience particular times when they know that they will be able to reach you.
As you plan your chat times, go in with a specific list of topics that you would like to discuss. However, don't feel as though you have to stick to the list. Let your customers take the lead and discuss topics that are of interest to them.
If the conversation starts to falter, you can dive into your list of pre-planned issues to help get them re-engaged in the discussion. You might want to recruit several members of your marketing team to help field questions and deal with traffic.
3. Look at the Content that is Driving Interaction
The entire goal of being on social media is to engage with your customers. So, you need to let your customers determine the type of interaction that you will use with them. First, you need to look at what social media sites are getting the most engagement.
Are your customers mostly interacting with you through your Facebook account or Twitter? If you are using Pinterest, how many views are you getting on your products? What about your Instagram account? Which social media sites do your customers care about?
Regularly look at the content that you are posting on your social media channels, paying particular attention to which posts have received far more or far less interaction than usual. What are the topics that are drawing out your customers and which ones are getting them to return to chat with other customers?
Any new announcement is going to generate attention, make sure that you are prepared for the big reveal ahead of time to increase your customer's excitement and create more interactions.
4. Tie in Blog Posts
For the most part, social media posts are intended to be relatively short. Every platform has a text limit, so there’s a minimal amount of information that you can share before the platform cuts you off and tells you that you are out of space.
Plus, even if you had an unlimited number of characters that you could work with, you don't want to write more information than you are confident that your customers will read. However, this doesn't mean you can't share more extended content on the various social media sites.
Use your social media channels to drive more significant traffic to your website and blog. Provide a compelling headline and one or two sentences as a teaser, plus a graphic from your blog post that is guaranteed to grab your audience's attention. You can also present a question that will require your audience to visit your site to read the entirety of the post.
This will not only draw more in-depth interaction with your social media profiles, but it will also help to increase the amount of traffic to your blog. You also don’t want to be afraid of putting a bit of a budget behind your content, because you’ll be shocked at what you can accomplish with very little money.
5. Use Visuals
Visuals go together with social media like peanut butter and jelly. In fact, images are regarded as the most crucial tactic that you can use to optimize your content for social media.
It has also been shown that they get more engagement than text alone. So, to start making a significant impact on social media, it is imperative that you start posting more images to your social media accounts.
Now, not just any image is going to do. Posting generic, stock photos to your channels aren't going to do the trick. Some of the most shared and successful photos that you can post include:
- Team photos
- Pictures of your customers
- Pictures from your events
- Pictures from behind-the-scenes
- Infographics
- Quote photos
These types of photos all have one thing in common; you make them. You also want to be sure to brand custom graphics with your website name or company logo so that your audience can easily trace them back to you.
There is always the potential that an infographic or selfie will go viral and get shared by authorities in your industry, making it a quick and easy way to elevate your presence on social media.
Conclusion
Social media is now the place for businesses and brands to be. As more and more companies and organizations begin to engage in social media, it is vital for you to up your game and outshine your competition.
Social media offers your business a platform that enables you to get in touch with your customers and understand them better. This allows you to provide them with better customer service and deliver what they need. Improving your social media presence and engagement is the key to earning more fans and followers.
Unfortunately, elevating your presence is going to take a lot of hard work and creativity. By implementing these five techniques into your social media marketing strategy, you’ll start to get more exposure, broadening your reach, and building your brand.
It won’t happen overnight, but with time and dedication on your part, you’ll be able to gain the social media recognition for your business and reap all the rewards.