Social media is a hot topic when it comes to businesses and marketing. Everyone wants to join in on the conversation, but not everyone knows the most effective way to do so. Social media is a powerful tool that allows for businesses to interact with clients and reach new potential clients. When starting out and implementing a social media plan for your company, it is important to include the correct content and strategies for the best results. According to Hubspot, “Social media marketing is the action of creating content to promote your business and products on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.” This post explains the best social media practices for businesses.
Define your target audience
When you are first creating a social media business account, it is crucial to define your target audience. A target audience is the audience you wish to reach with your posts. The people who you believe are most likely to give you business. Depending on your target audience, different social media platforms are better to use than others. For instance, if you are wanting to sell a product that is primarily for millenials then you should use a Facebook or Instagram account in order to effectively reach them. However, if you are trying to sell a product primarily to Generation X, you should know that an Instagram account would likely not be most effective for that age group. By defining your audience your business knows what social media platforms would work best for your social media strategy.
Communicate with your audience
Once you have correctly defined your target audience, the next step is to start posting and engaging with your audience. When it comes to posting content you want to post more than once a day. This does not mean posting every hour! A post each day will keep your brand relevant and in your audiences’ mind. Another way to communicate with your audience is replying directly to their comments. This includes the bad comments too! The quicker you reply to your audience, the more likely they are to continue to purchase something from your company. It may seem frustrating to reply to many comments, especially if they are negative, but once your company replies it starts a foundation for a relationship between the company and the consumer. This relationship is essential in creating trust and brand loyalty over time.
Use appealing visuals
When businesses think of visuals on social media they usually think of aesthetically pleasing pictures. While these look great, you can still also incorporate things like infographics. These still encourage more engagement from followers. Your account should have compelling visuals for followers to see. People like visuals because it helps them digest the information more than a bunch of words being thrown at them. If your company is service based or does not have many visual aspects that you can think of, stock photos are available online and provide great visuals to accompany posts. It’s time to get creative!
Use tools for posting
If your company is on multiple social media platforms it can be hard to keep up with every account. There are many websites and tools that manage your social media accounts and let you schedule posts so that you do not have to worry about posting everyday. A great way to make sure you stay up to date with your social media is by creating a social media calendar. Doing this also gives your company more time to reply to your audience rather than focusing on what you are going to post for that day. Do not be afraid to post during the evenings either, as social media never stops. People are always online and often most people are browsing the internet and their social channels at night, so sometimes that is the best time to post anyway.
Track engagement
Social Media engagement tracking tracks likes, shares, follows, and views on posts. This allows for your company to know the perfect time to post, so that you reach the most people, and also to know that if the posts you are sharing are working. Once you can tell what is working and what is not, you can start to reshape your social media plan and strategy. Adding more content like the posts that are getting more engagement and trying out new content that you think will fit best for your audience. Most social media platforms already have a tracking system available for business accounts so it is not difficult to track the engagement. You want to spend some time every week making sure that you are still doing well engaging your audience.
Social media may seem like a scary addition to your company’s marketing strategy, but if you follow these best practices you will be ahead of the curve. Social media is always changing so you want to make sure you remain aware of the trends that are changing and adapt as a company to ensure you aren’t left behind.
