It is important to create a social media strategy before jumping into the weeds of engaging prospects on social media. Create a social media strategy that works best for your brand, cultivates new followers, and converts customers into brand advocates. Understand the audience you are trying to reach and what interests them. Do they respond best to images, videos, or longer written posts? Establishing a tone, style, and cadence when posting as your brand should all be laid out prior to launching your social media profiles. Understand how your brand’s audience consumes content. Do they like in-depth long white papers or memes? Social media audience information will help you focus on the types of content that will lead to the best results. The AdEdge Team previously wrote about how to Manage Your Professional Brand On LinkedIn, but what about a social media strategy for your business?
Creating Social Media Business Profiles
The next step is to set up business profiles on the social media platforms that matter most to your business. Don’t spread yourself thin. Simply being on a social platform doesn’t mean that it will help your business image. It may even hurt your brand if a profile lays vacant and inactive.
In addition to a personal profile, creating a business page lets you connect with people who want to know more about your work. You can share updates, progress reports, and ideas with a wide range of folks who may not visit your website on a regular basis. Take a look at some quick tips to get your business profile started.
Get To Know Each Social Media Platform
On LinkedIn, you can create a company page and build an online community around it, getting customers and potential customers to follow you. To learn more about LinkedIn for business, see its official guide.
Twitter’s ad platform allows you to target particular audiences and reach them so they learn about your business and have an opportunity to become followers and engage with you. Take a look at its official guide to see how it can be part of your online business efforts.
For a business to succeed on Facebook, it’s about connecting with a community that engages with your content. If your product, service or idea is something people like and want to connect with, they will want to do the same on Facebook. To learn more about using Facebook for business, take a look at its official guide. When content is posted to your business page, the number of people that see it is called Reach. Increase your content reach with a few helpful tactics.
You should also explore Instagram’s advertising options and see how they fit in with your overall strategy. Instagram is all about getting existing and potential customers excited about what you do, so be sure to explore it. To learn about its business potential, take a look at its official guide.
There may be other social media platforms that your customers spend the majority of their time on – dive into where your audience is and adjust accordingly. Note: AdEdge team will continually update this blog with new and relevant social media platform information to best inform your business decisions.
Expanding Your Brand Via Social Media
After determining where your target audience is and spends the most time, you can start pumping out useful content that your following will love. If you haven’t already, find out how to create content your audience will want to share. Each platform has a different algorithm that it uses to release content, expand your brand with a unique approach for each of your social media business accounts.
Smart, relevant, timely posts can help you build a better company profile, especially when you use hashtags in a professional manner. Participating in popular hashtags when they are relevant to you works well. This should be a prioritized element of your social media strategy, while occasionally using hashtags around your products or services.
Features like Instagram Stories, which allow you to update your audience using multiple photos and videos, are ways to use Instagram in a business environment. These stories last for 24 hours, which could be time-consuming to produce when considering the limited time it is available to your audience. Most of the time, you are better off creating visuals and graphics you can use on multiple platforms that will also have a longer shelf life.
Advertising Is Different For Each Social Media Platform
Learning how Facebook ads work is essential for your digital marketing plans. You may find yourself under pressure to pay to boost your posts. However, organic growth models on social media almost always work better than paid acquisition. Instagram ads are often (but not always) created in conjunction with any Facebook campaign that is being launched. Their ad platforms are unified because Instagram is owned by Facebook. There is also a lot of cross over between campaign metrics and options for visual elements.
As with the other platforms, you should see if LinkedIn advertising features make sense for you. LinkedIn notoriously has higher costs per action than other social media platforms. But is that worth it when dealing directly with your target audience. CEOs or Product Managers from specific companies can be targeted for instance. Looking for a place to start? The AdEdge Team wrote about the costs and benefits to using LinkedIn or Facebook.
While creating a social media strategy may seem complex at first, these tactics are fairly simple to implement. More importantly, a good social media plan can build a community around your brand and be highly cost-effective. Want to learn more about social media strategy? Contact an AdEdge Specialist at 203-682-4585 or info@adedgemarketing.com. If you’d like to keep up with the latest and greatest digital marketing tactics, sign up for our once-monthly newsletter.