Over the last decade, social media has evolved substantially. It has become a platform for companies to reach new audiences that were previously unobtainable. It has become a sales and marketing tool and it has become a way for brands to have a deeper understanding of their customer.
So, how do you make full use of the platforms? How can you ensure that you are benefiting from the accessibility to so many potential customers? We thought we would take a look at some of the top ways brands are successfully using social media. From some great hints and tricks to new strategies you can implement. We compiled this guideline for you.
Know Your Followers
The first thing you need to know about social media, and targeting the right audience is who you need to be targeting. Who is your audience? Who is the customer that will convert? A customer profile will provide you with all of the information you need to be able to create the right content for your customers.
If you are wondering how to increase engagement on Instagram, for example, you will need to start with what your customers’ interests and behaviors are. What are they posting? When are they posting? What other accounts are they following and what type of content are they engaging with? The more information you get about what interests them, the more successful your posts are likely to be.
Content Can Heighten Conversions
Once you start getting a feel for who your audience is and what they like, you can start creating content. Regular keyword research is important to ensure that your content is trending. Keep your written content simple, yet informative, interesting, and educational. Make sure that it is also entertaining and eye-catching too.
One of the best things that you can do is create a content calendar at the beginning of your marketing cycles. List relevant dates, holidays, seasons, and anything else that has to do with your brand. Are you in fashion? Publish great content with events like fashion weeks, Black Friday, Halloween, Christmas, and obviously the seasons. Have themed content that you can roll out across all of the platforms in various formats. Images, stories, and videos can be created and dispersed to increase followers and engagement.
Don’t Just Focus on Followers
In the past, some of the key metrics that were analyzed when it came to social media were the number of followers and the number of likes on posts. The fact is, these stats are no longer a priority. You need to be focussing on real, organic followers rather than thousands of followers who could actually be bots. These fake accounts are less likely to convert than real followers. It is real, organic people who are more likely to follow you due to genuine interest in your brand and a higher likelihood of actually buying from you.
Community building has become a key trend for social media marketing. Getting real followers who will engage and convert is all about spending time and resources on creating content that they want to see and follow. Partner up with other brands, micro-influencers to reach their audiences too. Once you start co-creating content that their followers will be interested in, you are increasing the chances of gaining more organic followers and conversions.
Measure All of Your Metrics for Future Strategies
One of our key pieces of advice is to measure, track and monitor everything you do. Each social platform provides you with key insights into each post and how successful it was. How many likes did it receive, what were the click-through rates like? How many users engaged with the post and converted to paying customers? Combine these metrics with data coming in from Google Analytics. What was the traffic like on your site? How did it behave? Did they go through the whole sales funnel and become paying customers?
With this information, you can start planning out strategies for the future. Posts that were successful and received high rates of engagement and conversions can be duplicated in the future. If those posts were engaging once, they will be engaging again. So, build this data up over time. Track traffic and conversions over months and years to be able to effectively plan your strategy.
Bottom Line
With the right data at your fingertips, you can start making sure that you have a solid advantage with social media. Remember, your customers want to learn something from your brand. They want to be entertained and they want some eye-catching content that they are not seeing anywhere else. Build organic followers and engaged communities instead of focussing on thousands of fake followers. Conversions come from real people with real money.
