Social media is arguably modern-day word of mouth. It can be a powerful tool for your marketing, and there are plenty of opportunities you can reap from investing in social media marketing. However, it’s not without its challenges. Social media algorithms are constantly changing. Therefore, it’s essential to keep up with new opportunities to succeed with them. However, there are fundamental rules to successful social media marketing that are standard practice among expert digital marketing agencies such as Absolute Digital.
Define Goals
Your goals are the why’s in your business. It’s important to understand what you want to get from using social media marketing in business. Are you looking to increase your followers? Or are you hoping to build connections? Get clear on the purpose and intention of your social media marketing, which will help you define your strategy.
Insights & Data
To best understand your target audience, use insights and data that’s readily available to you. You can dive deep into your social media insights to understand your existing followers and their behavior online. For example, when they are most active, gender, age, and geographics. In general, you need to use data to understand your target audience’s values, needs, and pain points so you can refine your social strategy more clearly.
Social Strategy
Considering the data, what type of content will you post? Your social strategy is more about how you intend to communicate and market your business message. Data and insights will also give you some direction on the best times to post and what days of the week are more optimal than others. You’ll also be able to consider which type of content does best among your target audience in terms of engagement.
Engaging Content
Content is king when it comes to social media. Due to social media being overly saturated with content, it’s important to offer valuable content on social media that stands out from the rest. This will increase awareness, conversions, and credibility, ultimately helping your business generate sales and maintain loyal followers.
To create stand-out content, you need to focus on your uniqueness. To do this, it’s best to look at your content to understand what your audience engages with the most. Are there particular themes in your most successful pieces of content?
Switching up different styles of the content may be beneficial too. For example, breaking out of your comfort zone and creating video content may help your business’s presence online. Either way, you must be true to yourself and your brand to keep things consistent.
Consistency
Many businesses are mistaken by the need to post on social media every day. Consistent posting is most important, whether three times a week or every other day; it’s essential to find a consistency that suits your ability and capacity as a business. You might post once a day, every day, but if that’s unrealistic for you, then focus on realistic targets for how often you schedule and post content. It’s more about offering high-quality and purpose-led content over a compromised daily post to tick a box.
Build Community
Since competition is high on social media, building an engaged following is the prime avenue to loyalty, leading to more business sales and retention. It’s important to note that the community is different from the audience. Community is about how your followers engage with your brand and how they engage with one another about your brand. Make sure you are spending time acknowledging your comments, direct messages, emails, tags, story mentions. Spending a short amount of time each day to be attentive is a great way to foster more loyal followers.
