Whether you are already fluent in social media or reluctant to accept its significance, it’s become clear that this new technology is both effective and here to stay for the foreseeable future. In fact, the amount of social media users is expected to break 3 billion by 2021. Social media has changed the game as far as marketing, allowing for a novel avenue for interaction between businesses and consumers.
Whether you are using social media as a sole venturer into your own personal brand or using it as a means of enhancing your business, there are right and wrong ways to play the game. Anyone who has ever been to a poorly maintained website knows how off putting a lackluster online presentation can be. While the value of your service or product will always be the keystone to success, nobody will want to take a chance on you if your presentation to the world turns them off before a transaction can even occur.
This article will illuminate some ways to refine your social media presence and ensure you are taking advantage of the enormous potential it has.
Think About The Big Picture
To maximize effectiveness of social media, it should be conceptualized as part of a larger system. At one point in time, it may have been sufficient to merely have a website or a Twitter account for your business. It’s important to remember that the tides shift constantly in regard to social media and each platform’s particular significance.
To hedge your bets, its best to have as many platforms as part of your plan as you can adequately manage. This not only protects you if one platform begins to fall out of favor, but it also breeds familiarity with potential customers – and this turns out to be pretty important as far as cultivating preference.
Treat your social media as an adjunct to other effective techniques like email marketing and the resulting enterprise will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Aesthetics
A clean and attractive appearance can do wonders in bringing in followers or consumers. Just an unkempt storefront can make the difference between where you get your lunch, the same rule applies to social media. An aesthetic presentation shows that you care and that you are willing to go the extra mile to have all aspects of the operation in perfect order.
It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the formats of each platform, and understand the mechanics of things like Twitter feeds and Facebook cover sizes. You should visit each page you design and make sure it looks the way you intend it to, as the layout can sometimes look different from the followers’ end.
While it is important to spend time on how your brand appears across platforms, make sure you aren’t allocating all your resources on this end alone. A good first impression quickly gets devalued if these customers end up unsatisfied from a substandard product. In addition, you may have to pick and choose which platform works best for your brand if you are just starting out or otherwise lacking in resources sufficient to run five different accounts effectively.
Engage Often and Quickly
Social media platforms employ the use of algorithms to determine which content is featured prominently. Both Instagram and Facebook put a premium on engagement, using it to determine an account’s respective prominence. This means you can take advantage and comment or reply your way to noticeability. The faster you are to the punch, the more inclined people will feel to interact.
One brand that made excellent use of interaction to increase engagement and prominence is Wendy’s, which cleverly employed biting wit and retorts to both spur on internet trolls and encourage the Twittersphere to follow and spectate the exchanges.
Use Social Media To Cross-Pollinate
Once you have established a clear strategy, you can then use paid promotion to increase the reach of your organic presence. This is a service offered by most if not all social media platforms and allows you several different payment options to exacerbate your normal reach.
Doing this comes with an array of benefits, and allows you to better connect with audiences that approximate your target audience. For example, it may connect consumers who have sought out similar brands with your own.
Take Advantage of Analytics
The field of social media analytics is a valuable resource that you can use to fine-tune your approach by seeing what is proven effective and what isn’t. These analytics will provide you with statistics like how long people spent looking at a certain page, what types of surveys were most effective, and so on.
Tools like Google Analytics as well as on-site functions on Facebook can provide you with valuable feedback that you won’t find merely from voluntary customer feedback.
