It’s time to leave the safety of your comfort zone when it comes to content creation and your digital presence. You may feel right at home when you post blogs on your website, but disseminating your brand story takes a much more versatile approach to get more followers, views, and higher engagement. All of that, of course, for the sake of more loyal customers down the road.
Social networks are a place where your audience hangs out to be entertained, informed, and educated, with a much greater range of communicating. Through emoticons, informal comments, as well as shares, reviews, and likes, social networks have become the place where everything happens – including your possible customers’ decision-making.
Choose your platforms
Not all networks are created equal, at least in the sense in which you will use them to get your brand in front of the right people. Choosing the right platforms means that you first need to know who your customers are, which will also significantly shape the kind of content they enjoy. For instance, Pinterest and Instagram are highly visual, even though the latter leaves plenty of room for lengthy texts, they are predominantly used to create a visual appeal around your brand.
Then again, Tweeter is all about short and sweet posts that get plenty of traction, while Facebook allows a vast variety of content types to be mixed and matched. Maybe you should consider them all, but perhaps only two would suffice. Also, don’t forget the professionally-oriented LinkedIn, as well as YouTube as a great platform to educate and impress!
Create a plan
Even if you’re running your business all on your own, being an entrepreneur takes all of your energy, and then some, to actually grow your business. It’s not a coincidence that the tasks around social media are summed into an entirely separate job post, which means that you might even consider hiring a social media manager, or at least tech-up your posting to make it easier on your workload.
Now that you’ve established where your audience is, figure out when, how often, and how much time they spend on each network. Businesses all over the world have implemented social media tools that can help you create a desired schedule for your different platforms and organize your posts according to your needs.
Monitor and adjust
No matter how much you know about your audience, the fickle human mind changes often, even if not drastically. These changes in preferences, opinions, tastes, trends, and styles affect every brand differently. You need to know in what contexts your brand appears, how people communicate about your company, and whether there’s a fire that needs putting out.
You can learn from the best in business, as including media monitoring in Australia across many industries has become an essential part of any brand’s online strategy. You need to stay in the loop when it comes to the news in your niche and the latest events that may affect your business – and utilize the data to tailor your social media posts every time.
Diversify your content
As a small business, you deal with a large competition, which in turn means that you need to keep your social content game at its best. People get quickly bored with monotone, predictable posts, and they prefer content that provides actual value, in addition to being branded, and they least of all appreciate promotional posts. That is why you should do your best to balance the types of social media posts you share and make them as appealing and as audience-specific as possible.
The world has shifted towards a more visual-focused type of content, which lets you introduce imagery, videos, infographics, memes, gifs, and similar animations into your posts. That way, you’ll keep your audience interested! However, make sure that your posts have a purpose – whether they aim to educate, intrigue, inspire, motivate, or inform, they need to have an applicable value, or else they’ll end up delivering no results or engagement.
Meet your influencers
Finally, every business, no matter how small it may be, can make friendships with the right people. The era of influencers began a long time ago, but the trend is only growing. You can reach out to your existing customers to be your brand ambassadors on social media, or find someone who would do a review of your product or service.
This relationship alone will get you much more visibility and more engagement with each post. Influencers are the lifeblood of many up-and-coming brands, as they give your brand a more relatable look and feel, and your audience will always make decisions based on the opinions of those they trust.
Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is currently working with many companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies. He is also a coauthor on several technology websites and a regular contributor to Technivorz.