Marketing on social media is no longer an optional route; rather, a must, regardless of the size of your business or the stability of your customer base. Many business owners are still stuck in a mindset of ‘Our customers know us and how to find us’. This isn’t necessarily a bad thought to have, it’s just outdated.
Social media has grown exponentially in recent years, and it would be unwise from a business perspective not to jump on that train ASAP. Including it in your marketing strategy will help you get more money from your existing customers, as well as increasing your pool of customers as a whole.
Managing Your Social Media Presence
1. Establish Your Audience
If you have a business then you’re already aware that this is arguably the most important step in any marketing strategy. Before broadcasting anything you need to know who you’re showing it to.
You may already have a rough idea of the demographics of your most prominent customers, but with the help of social media tools you can see more in-depth analytics to give you an even more comprehensive overview of who to target.
2. Create an Automated Post Calendar
In the hustle and bustle of daily life we don’t have time to make time every day for social media. On busier days we run the risk of letting the quality of the content suffer because we simply didn’t have any more time to share.
An easy way to circumvent this is to establish what content your audience would most enjoy, when they are most active on the platforms you are using and create a big batch of content all at once, you can use a social publishing tool like Hootsuite, Buffer and TweetDeck to schedule them ahead of time.
3. Engage, Engage, Engage!
With the rest of the month freed up thanks to all your posts having been scheduled, you can use the extra time to create a presence for yourself and your business.
A good way to do this is to do some hashtag research that is relevant to your posts and your business and see what other people are posting using them as well. Like, comment and share these posts, interact with them often and perhaps even follow the accounts. You’ll notice that they might interact with your posts as well, and follow you back. Their audiences might check out your account out of curiosity, and with time, these practices will help your account grow.
4. Consistency is Key
Targeting a specific audience, using the right hashtags and engaging with other accounts are all good and well, but the important part comes with maintaining the strategy. You need to keep posting the same, high quality content consistently to maintain the steady growth.
Social media algorithms are set up to recognise the patterns in the posting of content and it’s important to keep the algorithms happy for your accounts to grow.
Happy posting!