As time goes on, social media platforms are growing bigger and bigger – making them an increasingly valuable tool for businesses to make use of. However, it’s not enough to just have an account and occasionally post about your business – you need to know how to make proper use of it. There’s a lot that goes into gaining followers, nurturing your audience, and attracting the right people – and it can take some time to learn as someone who is new to it.
With that said, just know that social media is a tool that businesses cannot live without these days, as it provides you not only with a great way to market your business – but acts as a bridge that allows you to communicate more with your customers. It’s not just about money and making sales, it’s about branding – and your social media page could be a great way to represent your business in front of your audience.
5 Tips For Improving Your Social Media Marketing
Understand The Platforms
If you’re going to pick a social media platform to start on, it’s important to understand how things should be on that platform. Each platform serves a different purpose, so the kind of content that you’re going to be posting should be different based on the platform. For example, if you’re looking to write lengthy posts and not so much video or image content, places like Instagram aren’t going to be a good place for your business to start.
Consistent Posting
One of the most important parts of using social media for your business is your ability to put out consistent content. Social media marketing in general can be quite time-consuming, which is why many larger businesses will have social media managers. Even so, as a small business, you can put out content consistently, and you can make it easier if you re-use content across your different platforms. For example, if you know how to post YouTube videos to Instagram, you could recycle content that your Instagram followers have yet to see.
Being consistent is one of the bigger challenges for smaller business owners, because of the amount of time it takes up – as well as requiring the constant need for new ideas that are going to keep followers coming in. It can take some time to get used to, but it’s an important part of every business’s marketing schemes.
Be Creative
It’s social media, you have to think about the average attention span to expect from your audience when you post something. If you’re posting long videos or lengthy text posts, you can expect people not to read them. Instead, you should think about conveying your message with visual aids, and keep it short and snappy. Using social media can help your team to get more creative with marketing as a whole because there’s a challenge in putting out enough of a message in something short and sweet.
You’ve also got to keep in mind that it’s important some of your content is entertaining – you want people to stick around. If you’re boring everyone with the same marketing content over and over again – you’re going to lose your followers faster than you gain them.
Finding Your Target Audience
Before you can see success in your social media usage, you need to know how to connect with your audience. It can be tricky to get a good idea of what your audience wants, and it’s a good idea to look into what your competitors are doing. As you’re sharing an audience, it should be pretty easy to see what’s working for them, and what kind of approach you should be taking when you’re making use of the same platforms.
Engaging Your Audience
Creating content and posting consistently is important, but you have to make sure you’re making use of one of the main benefits of social media marketing. Having that gap bridged between you and your audience allows for a lot more engagement between you and your customers, which can make for a great way to grow your reputation and build trust.
Some social media platforms allow for polling, which gives you a quick system for collecting feedback on something very specific. While it’s not the most detailed form of feedback, it does help to give you a good idea of what you could change within your business and will show how much of your audience thinks a certain way. It’s not perfect, but it helps you as a business and lets your audience feel like they’re a part of the decision-making.
