With the broader shift towards eCommerce over the past year, and the expanded usage of social media as a means of connection, on various fronts, as you’ve no doubt heard repeated over and over again, it’s now imperative for all businesses to have a social media presence in order to maximize their online presence and boost brand awareness – and thus, sales as a result.
But it’s one thing to say ‘go build a social media presence’ and another thing altogether to do it. That’s even more so the case in the current environment, because the competition for attention online is increasingly fierce, and it can be difficult to get your brand presence to stand out, and to establish any sort of following in social apps.
It can be disheartening to put time and effort into your social profiles to only gain a few followers each week, and it can feel like there’s no point. Because it’s not just creating a Page and posting a few pictures that goes into building a social media presence, there’s research required, planning, and you need to have some direction in that effort.
So where do you start, and what are the key elements that you need to factor in?
Here’s a quick overview of three key planning points that you need to tick off on your social media strategy list, which will help to ensure that you’re putting your best foot forward in each app.
This likely goes without saying, but it is a crucial point. In order to get your business presence to show up for all relevant queries, and to give people all the information they need to connect, and buy from you, you need to ensure you’ve filled out every field of your business profile, on every platform, including phone numbers, email info, hours of operation, etc.
It’s one thing to read general advice guides about what you should be posting, when you should be posting, what works best on each platform, etc. But many of these guidelines are overall pointers based on broad engagement trends – when formulating your own digital marketing strategy, you don’t want to assume that something will work, you want to know, as best you can, what’s relevant for your specific target audience, and how you can meet them where they’re looking.
For this, you need to conduct research in your local or niche market, and understand which of your competitors are seeing good response on social, what they’re doing to achieve that, and how you can build your approach along similar lines.
This element does take time, but once you’ve established these performance benchmarks, you’ll then be building your strategy based on current, real-world data, so your own targets will be based on what your competitors are actually seeing, giving you a true comparison for your performance.
The next research element is broader content trends, in order to determine the right hashtags to use, the key topics of interest to guide your product and marketing strategies, and which platforms are of most relevance for your outreach – even if you’re competitors are not using them.
Based on the information you glean from these sources, you can then formulate a more concrete strategy, built on true audience data, not hypothesis, which will then help you refine your posting approach to get your brand name in front of the people who are looking for related content on social platforms, so you’ll have clearer direction as to what you should be posting, what’s generating engagement, what types of updates resonate best, and the informational trends that can boost your discoverability.
Of course, some of these apps are paid tools, so it does take a level of investment, or partnering with an advisor who can provide such insights. But if you want to maximize your opportunities, you need to have a clear understanding not only of general trends and notes, but what, specifically, is working in your niche.
These research pointers are a solid starting point, and once you begin your investigation, you’ll likely start to see trends and patterns emerge that will then inform your process, and improve your broader understanding of what to post, what to promote, and how you can get your messaging in front of the right people via social apps.
And with the holidays fast approaching, now is the time to get a handle on your audience, and boost your marketing opportunities.
Follow Andrew Hutchinson on Twitter
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