It will be not wrong to say that “Social Media is the most powerful tool of Digital Marketing”. No matter what is the size of the business, everyone wants their Social Media Presence. Be it a Brand or organization or any institutional use social media platforms every single day to connect with their audiences, raise awareness, and drive leads and business.
On an average, one spends almost two hours on different social media channels every day. That’s a great opportunity for all the companies to catch the eyeball. If you develop a strong social media presence, users will eventually spend some amount of that time on your social media channels.
But the real question is how many brands have an active, thriving and engaging social media presence? And how much of them are just there for the sake of being on social media? They find it difficult to create a social media presence that their customers love because they underestimate its importance. Or they might overthink their overall social media strategy. Either way, they’re moving in the wrong direction as not adding any additional point to their branding.
On the other hand, a lot of Brands think simply having 1,000 Facebook fans or 2000 Instagram followers is a good indicator of social media success. Trust me it is not! Gaining followers is easy but sustaining them is not. It is just a click away. There will be thousands of followers who never read your posts or click on your links. The goal is to build a thriving online community of your ideal audience, the ones who will actively engage with your content, share it with their networks, and ultimately, become paying customers. And to make this goal reach its destination what we need is – A concrete Social Media Strategy.
What is Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is a nothing but a summary of everything you plan to do to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re moving in the right direction. The more specific your plan is, the more effective it is going to going.
Why one needs a strong Social Media Presence?
Building Social Media Presence is just not the sake of completing your marketing goals but a whole lot more than that. It gives your brand the much-needed Awareness it needs of Digital Platform. In addition to that, it also boosts your web traffic and acquires new customers by increasing conversions from social media channels. Moreover, it helps to a wide variety of audiences. Lastly, it gives the platform to establish your company as an industry leader.
How to Make a Strong presence and impactful strategy?
To make a Strong Presence on social media various people will give you vague suggestions without the real implementation part. A lot of people will suggest you to regularly update different social media channels; others will suggest building and engaging online communities. Whereas, some people will ask you to monitor your activities and adjust your strategy. Sound simple, right?
Then, why do you still spot your profile not using the whole potential of social media marketing? The main reason is that you don’t have a bulletproof social media plan. You need a whole lot more than this to achieve your goals. Let’s have a look at those points to improvise your presence –
- Set the SMART goals
You should know time is money. So when you’re investing in social media, you not only want to focus on achieving a higher Return on investment, but also a good Return on time investment.
Each of your goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Social media goals should be aligned with your overall marketing objectives to have overall sync. This makes it easier to show the value of your work and of course secure buy-in from your bosses. There’s no other way around. For example, If your Business objective is to grow the Brand; your social media goal should be aware and metrics to be followers and shares. If you are using Instagram for brand awareness, you might track the number of Instagram Story views and shares.
By setting goals, you’ll know if you are making the most of your time, or if you need to change things both digitally and On Ground.
After all, this is the time for Smart- work not Hardwork.
- Understand your Audience
Knowing who your audience is and what they expect to see on social media is the key. In this way, you can create content that they will like, will put those double hearts, will do comment and share as well. It’s also important to know if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business or just as a digital audience to watch your space. Like Zomato don’t sell its services on social media but they still have enough followers to make them Social media leaders.
When it comes to your target customer, you should keep the following things in mind –
- Who exactly falls under your target customer category?
- Which social media platforms they use the most.
- What kind of interests they have.
You need to get in the shoes of your audience and truly understand how they exactly engage with it. To know that you need to check what they share, what they follow and how they engage.
For example, you are a Cosmetic Brand selling lipstick, you need to understand what type of shades, brands and types of lipsticks your customers are more inclined to.
In the last, DO NOT make assumptions. Do you think Facebook is a better network for reaching Baby Boomers than Millennials? Well, data show that Millennials still outnumber Boomers on the platform. Don’t trust your instincts in this case but the numbers.
- Give Human Touch
To make your social media presence fruitful and achieve a better return on investment, you need to understand what makes social media special in the first place. Why do people use it? What is that one thing that makes them attached to it?
Is it the ads you run? No.
Is it the Market value of your Brand? No.
Is it because it has hundreds of millions of followers? No.
Try and look that what makes social media sites so impactful? The answer is very simple that people can connect to other people that they know. Your customers are real human beings craving for real human connections, and that’s why they are using social media networks. And they want the same from your page as well – A Human touch.
Try to talk in the language and lingo most used by your Target Audience. Avoid heavy vocabulary wherever possible. This will make your audience more comfortable with your brand. You can simply be helpful by replying to customer queries, sharing useful information, and even cracking jokes with your followers.
- Let your Visual Speak
Visuals are becoming an ever-important part of a marketing strategy but branding your images for social media can be a challenge Majorly, People do not read on Social Media. So what to do in that case? Let your Visuals speak for you. 82% of the marketers believe visuals are important to the very important part of the social media content optimization, and 52% say video content produces the best ROI.
So it is very important to be sure to include an eye-catching, colourful image or graphic with each post. Content with relevant images notches up 94% more views than content without images.
So try to apply Balance to Your Images. Ask yourself; what is the goal of your post? What information do you want to give across, and what action do you want the audience to take. Make sure your most important elements are in the biggest fonts in the visual. You can hire a professional Graphic Designer to add graphics to your blog entries and social media posts.
- Use Consistent Photos, Headshots, and Logos
Make sure you have consistency across all of your social media platforms. You want to be easily recognized, yet so many small brands’ contents to leave up profiles with mismatched logos and photos, some of which are blurry and improperly sized and aligned.
This type of inattention causes unnecessary chaos for your audience and can make you seem unprofessional. Instead of using whatever photos you have handy or simply taking the one-size-fits-all approach, take the time to create a consistent brand image across all the platforms and optimize your chosen photos according to each platform’s specifications.
Here, we present the most used one –
- Facebook: 180×180
- Google+: 250×250
- Twitter: 400×400
- LinkedIn 400×400
Talking about the Headshots, you do not need to Hire a Professional Photographer or in that case an Editor. Everything is available on your phone, from high pixels cameras to the basic editing tools, in one go. Make sure to have a proper and systematic theme to your pictures.
- Make a Social Media Calendar
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Quoting Burns won’t help you get away with not having a well-thought-out content plan, of which CONTENT is the king. A content calendar is a schedule which helps you organize your upcoming content by detailing what and at what time – the date you will post. With this document comes in handy in place, when you’ll spare yourself the terror of coming up Deadline right before it’s time to get down to work. Now trust me, scribbling your content topics on a piece of paper, post-it notes, and in random notebooks isn’t a particularly a good idea.
Your Social Media calendar gives you a better perspective of your overall marketing strategy. You will be able to align your topics with your social media, email marketing content and offline marketing as well.
- Stay on top of Moment Marketing
Marketing is a fast-paced field. In order for you to stand out, you have no choice but to stay up with the trends and come up with something that is Zingy and out of the box. It will be not wrong to say that the era of static marketing is long gone with campaigns and strategies planned out weeks or even months ahead. Now it’s DO or DIE situation with every other Brand.
Moment marketing is taking advantage and leveraging current trends via viral content that people easily relate to. It is done to capture people at the right time place where people are most interested in.
The product reaches the audience quicker than usual with this zingy technique and easily floats in the market for a long time. For example brands like Zomato, Swiggy, Dunzo, Durex and Fevicol gain instant success on social media.
Customers are already part of the 24/7 news cycle, which makes moment marketing work. Well, thanks to the immediacy and richness of content available today on demand.
Engaging in the conversation in this manner can make your brand familiar. Be sure you are up to date with content. Use humour sparking spontaneous conversations with your audience. And yes never forget to customize your content according to the taste of your audience.
For example, Netflix; it does a good job of channelling its sassiness with always on point, tongue in cheek humour.
- Evaluate and adjust your strategy
Your social media strategy is a hugely important document for your Digital Branding. And in this case, also you can’t assume you’ll get it exactly right on the first try. As you start to implement your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies work and some do not.
In this case, use Look at performance metric. You will be able to see exactly which social posts drive the most traffic. Use it to re-evaluate your strategy regular basis. You can also use this information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against each other on different platforms. Constant testing allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine and come up with a new strategy.
Wrap-Up
Social media moves very fast. New networks emerge; others go through demographic shifts every now and then. All of this means that your social media strategy should be a living document that you review and refine as needed.
Growing a social media presence for your small business isn’t an impossible task but is all about small everyday activities. We hope our tips will help you face the challenge and make Social Media Presence stronger.