The buying power of the people on social media is immense and significant. If you can draw enough of those people to take an interest in even once of your campaign, your sales can increase dramatically. Learning how to attract people and, thus, their buying potential is an essential aspect of utilizing social media correctly.
These platforms offer an organic way to build your brand, engage with customers, and build a digital community of loyal customers. It is an opportunity to humanize your company and nurture a supportive relationship with your social media audience, effectively converting them from observers into buying customers.
Unfortunately, once social media platforms gain a following, most companies tend to forget that it needs to remain a dynamic source of interaction and content. If it gets too promotional, people will not be able to engage with your brand on an emotional level. They will feel betrayed and stop supporting your business. If your social media presence stops being consistent, people will jump ship to a consistent and reliable company. Find out how to navigate social media in a way that benefits your business and adds to your brand identity.
Choose Your Platforms
Choosing the right platform for your business is very important. The right platform can help build up your brand identity, find ways to work together cohesively with your brand message, and help you reach the right target market.
Facebook and Instagram are good for growing a community, connecting with customers, and selling directly to people through simple campaigns, promotions, and engaging with them via contests.
LinkedIn and Facebook are better for establishing your business as a thought leader in the industry. This is the best way to reach out to others in your field, network digitally, and have useful connections that you can exploit to build your brand as a go-to source of information and solutions.
Snapchat and YouTube are for companies that have a lot of products that can be demonstrated for their many uses. These platforms are great for sharing video content, creating a brand identity that does not take itself too seriously, and engaging very directly with customers about their interests, queries, and even suggestions.
Customer Communication
Engaging with customers does not only mean sharing content that they can enjoy and then share with others. It is also about having a dialogue with your audience. Reply to Direct Messages, emails, comments on your posts, reviews, and share photos and videos you are tagged in.
Hire a staff member to make this their full-time job. Brief them on the brand identity you are trying to build and provide them with a list of answer suggestions so that they have a framework to work with. Then let me focus on making your target demographic feel heard, valued, and important to your business. This type of direct communication and interaction is much more likely to result in sales.
Vary Your Posts
Your social media platforms are not solely for self-promotion. Your audience will get bored fast and realize that there is no real intention to connect with them. You must vary your content to stay engaged and see that your company truly wants to be supportive of the community.
You must share content and promotional materials on occasion. But in addition to this, develop a schedule for sharing user-generated content. This will encourage customers to find ways to provide content to you. They are also more likely to spread the post to their family and friends because they are proud that you shared their content.
Giveaways are popular on social media because people enjoy free products. Put forward rules for the giveaway, including sharing the content, tagging others, and commenting on the post. Be transparent with choosing winners and ensure that you follow through on the giveaway promises, or you will lose integrity with your audience.
Polls and quizzes are engaging and a fun way to collect information about a variety of topics. Offer short and interesting games on your website, which people can access through links on your social media. Share the weekly rankings and give away small items like digital stickers and badges that people can share on their social media.
This is just a small sample of the types of content you can share. Info-graphics, interviews, Question and Answer sessions, reactions to nationally relevant headline news, and partnership events with local businesses are all also effective and interesting sources for social media content.
Track your posts via social media metrics to find out what content is the best at engaging with your audience. If your audience engages best when you ask questions and answer queries, then make this a regular activity on your social media platforms. If sharing other people’s risque memes makes people stop following your page, then do not do that anymore. There is an inherent risk in sharing meme-like use-generated content as the message it represents may tarnish what your brand identity stands for.
Finding out how to drive engagement and avoid losing it is a crucial aspect of running social media platforms. Analyze what works for you and why so you can direct your staff to create more content that follows along those lines. Your brand identity must always come first and not the interests and humor of your social media team. If they cannot separate their own interests from your business-related social media, then it is time to get a new team.
