Digital marketers are usually quick to spot trends and adopt new platforms to drive successful online campaigns. Surprisingly, even in this day and age, a sizeable portion of businesses undermine the importance of creating and managing an active presence on social media. Most are willing spend a lot of money on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content creation to get their website rank high on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). However, they consider the time and effort required to maintain social media accounts as a waste of resources. This can mean that they end up blindsided by an unexplained lack of website traffic despite investing heavily in SEO.
The strategy for pure SEO used to work fairly well until social media gained prominence. Today, businesses understand that having a presence on multiple social media platforms is a must. But, it is also true that not all of them know how best to leverage such a diverse range of communication channels. Foregoing the multiplicity that social media offers usually means a failure to expose the brand to the widest number of people who are right there and ever hungry for fresh content. A business cannot have a strong online presence by just creating a Facebook page or posting occasionally on Twitter. They need to find out the platforms where most of their target demographic is active, and then be active with them. This lets businesses start capitalising on the strength of a solid social media campaign that will likely cover multiple platforms.
As is obvious, it is not sufficient to just create multiple social media profiles and pages. To get noticed, a business needs to create new posts frequently and regularly. Social media is a way to directly interact with customers and this represents incredible potential and opportunities for those who are willing to participate. Yet, many businesses end up plastering their pages with ad-like posts links to their website with little to engage their readers. Consequently, they fail to engage them or reach a wider customer base.
Any business would naturally want to tap the power of social media and leverage it to strengthen their market position, broaden the customer base, or simply boost sales and revenue. This is exceedingly simple if you are willing to be more active about how your customers feel. Here are a few things that can help you get started.
•Create a Strong Profile: When you create a social media profile, make sure to fill in all the relevant, accurate and concise details about your business. Personalisation is not just for your, well, personal profile. Choose an appropriate username, add your logo, address, contact details, as well as a small ‘bio’ about your business to help any visitors (read potential customers) know more about you. Your profile must set up a good first impression about your business and products/services.
•Stay Active: A humongous of content is generated on social media every hour. You will find it most effective to schedule your posts over the course of the day. You should also update most or all of your social media accounts multiple times a day to make sure that your customers have a chance to see your updates before someone else’s content pushes it down. You also need to be prompt when responding to your customer’s queries and concerns. This can be difficult without a dedicated team. Alternatively, you can hire a firm that offers social media content writing services to create content for your profiles. Many of them also offer Social Media Management services.
•Be a Part of the Conversation: Unless you are already a household name, you will have to invest time and energy to reach and stay connected your customer base. Join communities, groups, or pages where your target customers search for information, services, or products. Do not generate spam by leaving links or praising your own products, especially without context. It is better to focus on winning their trust by answering their questions and providing useful information.
•Create a Buzz: Talking about trending topics, news, and other important information about your industry can establish you as an authority on the subject. It will make the customers trust you more over your competition. Also, campaigns or contests to encourage customer interaction and rewarding them occasionally with freebies and discounts will keep you at the top of the customer’s mind. Hiring social media marketing services can prove to be invaluable for streamlining and making the most from such activities.
•Cross-Platform Interdependence: Different social media platforms gave their own methods and rules for how content is posted and shared. It is important to maintain this congruity in your posts. It is important to remember the small details. For instance, the hashtag is not relevant on all social media sites. These differences also affect how you structure your posts. Never create just a single post and copy paste on other platforms. Each should be unique but posts made around the same time should preferably be about the same thing(s). If you absolutely must, provide a link to the original post but ideally, your posts should be able to hold out on their own.
A dedicated team of digital marketing and social media management experts can go a long way in achieving your business’s goals. As your social media presence grows, you will find it increasingly difficult to handle the various accounts on your own. It is simply more efficient and cost-effective to just have a small team or even a single person who can help you formulate the broad strokes of your digital marketing strategy and coordinate or oversee the implementation. For the bulk of the work, you can hire a quality social media management services firm who can help you iron out the details in your plans and flesh out your campaigns.
