Over 2.4 billion people turn to social media sites everyday, and these numbers are expected to soar over 3 billion by the year 2021. In general, social media is considered as the heartbeat of the internet.
If you own a business then you cannot really ignore social media promotion. However, managing your business on social media can be little tricky and also overwhelming if you do not have the right plans and strategies set in motion.
Maintaining a healthy social media presence comes with its own set of benefits. It is a part of the Google algorithm to rank your websites. If your business is popular on social media, there is a high chance your website will receive highly targeted visitors from search engines and also directly from the social media sites. More targeted visitors mean more engagement, increased conversion rates, and the return on investment.
Keeping that in mind, let’s look into some essential and useful tips to properly manage your social accounts to improve your business’s popularity and presence on social media networks.
1. Ask or Listen to Your Customers
Most business pages on Facebook just keep posting promotional ads or banners all the time and be done with it. Result? These pages always stay low when it comes to engagement from customers or users. If you want to establish a healthy presence on social media you need to interact with your customers and listen to their needs and address it properly. When you do that you create a healthy base of loyal users who stay by your side, trust you more, and turn into your customers. Make posts that are engaging, and that asks for opinions of your potential customers.
2. Be Consistent and Commit Yourself
If you want to yield maximum benefits through social media sites, you need to commit yourself and make it a priority. That doesn’t mean you need to keep posting something every couple of hours or making 10 posts a day and be done with it for another month. You need to experiment with different post frequencies and check how your customers react to it. If a couple of posts a day seems to be just the right amount for your business then be consistent with it. When you are consistent you start to become a part of your customer’s daily routine, and they will eagerly look for your posts.
Also, watch out for the timings when you schedule or publish your posts. This will totally depend on the geographical location of your business and customers. Schedule your posts to be published on a specific time frame when the maximum number of your followers are expected to stay online. Doing this, you will increase the chances of your posts getting maximum engagement and click-through rates.
3. Set Achievable Goals
When starting with social media promotions you obviously want to achieve a specific goal that will directly impact your business in a positive way. Whatever may be your goal, make it achievable. Building a loyal customer base takes time and effort.
Do not wish for something that is outlandish or far from reality. Be more realistic and set achievable targets for a specific time frame and improve upon it. Let your efforts be channeled towards achieving these goals instead of posting something aimlessly without a target to reach. These goals can be in terms of engagement or acquiring a specific number of fans within a set time frame.
4. Identify Your Target Audience
You can have hundreds of thousands of followers or fans following your social media accounts, but if those fans do not fall into your target audience category, those fans will be of little help for your business.
Identifying your target audience gives you more clarity on what to post when to post, and the frequency of your posts. Additionally, you can curate your profile information to attract your potential customers.
Many social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest offers you an option to target specific users based on their gender, location, and age. When you know your target audience your spending becomes more worthwhile.
5. Interact with Your Fans but as a Human
No matter how big or how small as a company you are, no one really feels comfortable associating or interacting with a faceless entity with no individuality or personality. Make it a point to interact with your users, reply to their comments or opinions, and if possible post photographs of your team or yourself so that your users can connect with you on a personal level.
Your interactions with your customers and fans need not have to be professional all the time. Obviously, we all hate those robotic replies to queries and concerns, which kind of ruins your brand image. Many popular brands today on social media are not afraid to interact with their fans just like their friends would, and sarcasm is not out of the context. But, you must know where to draw your boundaries without going overboard.
6. Select Your Social Media Networks Effectively
There are literally tens and hundreds of social media sites on the internet. You do not really want to focus on each and every one of them, which is next to impossible. Based on your business goals and the target audience you can, however, come up with certain social networks that make more sense to dedicate your time and efforts to.
Having said that, never ignore the popular ones like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn. These platforms have remained stable over the years and have some of the most loyal user bases on the internet.
However, you can just focus on one or two platforms from the popular ones that will be more beneficial for your type of business. For example, if your target audiences are mostly women then focusing on Pinterest and Instagram might fetch you a better return on investment.
7. Curate Your Contents Based on The Network of Your Choice
Statistics prove that videos have better engagement, reach, and conversion in platforms like Facebook and YouTube. However, photos have over 80 to 90% engagement rate on Instagram and Pinterest. When you decided to focus on certain networks over the other, try to curate your posts or contents that have proven to work better on that particular platform instead of posting the same content on all the platforms.
You can also take advantage of live videos on platforms like YouTube and Facebook to maximize the engagement of your audience. A recent study has proved that Facebook live videos get around 600% more engagement over any other content on the platform.
8. Automate Your Social Media Posts
Obviously, you cannot be there spending your time on social media sites all the time. Luckily, there are tools and built-in features on most platforms that you can take advantage of and schedule your posts ahead of time. This will not only save you a ton of time but also ensures your account appears active to your customers.
You can also speed up certain repetitive tasks by using templates or presets for videos or photos which you might want to use on social media sites. This ensures you do not have to keep repeating the same actions on media editing software packages each time you want to create a post.
Regular updates make sure your fans do not forget about your presence and are constantly reminded about your brand name. Just in case you do not want to automate the process or use online tools, you can get the job done by hiring a freelancer or a social media agency.
9. Batch Your Social Media Contents
You can create content on a daily basis to be posted each day, but from a professional standpoint, this is considered a very bad practice. Because switching between number tasks every day will make your mind feel tired very easily and you will end up wasting a lot of time and energy on each task. There is also a chance that you might want to skip a task for the day. This habit can end up ruining your regular post updates on social media sites.
Set aside a day or two in a week and create posts for the whole month or for the whole week and schedule them in advance. This way your mind can focus on a specific task and even if you end up sick for a day or two in between, your social media accounts will still stay active.
10. Integrate Your Social Media Accounts to Your Website
Let the world know that you are officially available on social media sites you decided to stay active on. You can link your social media accounts to your website, or email signature. This way people who want to stay connected to you are just a click away from becoming your long-time followers.
Popular social media sites such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram offer widgets and apps that can be added to your site for easy integration. Mostly this integration process is straightforward and is a matter of copying and pasting a few lines of codes to your website’s backend.