Social media has grown so much over the years that today it is an essential place for advertising your products or services. However, entering this virtual reality world might get you feeling dizzy and even lost. There are so many different social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok.. That you might ask yourself: Which ones should I start off with? How many times a day should I post? What kind of posts should I make?
Many businesses already have a social media strategy running but they notice after a while that it doesn’t present them with the results they expected (that if they even measure them!). This might be the outcome of not setting a clear goal before starting your campaign. We’ve listed some goals you might have below, so you can begin by giving this a proper thought:
- Increase community engagement. Asking questions, using hashtags and posting user-generated-content it’s a great way to make your followers feel interested in participating in your campaign.
- Generate leads and sales. Making sure to alert your customers about special discounts, new releases and updates.
- Increase brand awareness. Your social media accounts must reflect your brand’s personality in a way that it’s easy to identify and that distinguishes your brand from others.
- Expand your audience. It’s all about growing numbers in this one. More followers, more likes, more shares!
- Boost web traffic. Adding your links to posts is the best way to make leads find their way into your website!
Whichever goal you set, once you’ve decided what you want, it will be a lot easier to define your content strategy!
Aside from posting regularly, it’s very important to make an impact and to enhance the social media image of your company. And while it’s great to maintain an active presence online, it is ideal that it doesn’t take up much of your time. The best way to make sure you don’t end up sitting in front of the computer staring at a blank post is to plan ahead and organize your content.
This is why we’ve decided to share these four tips with you, so you can improve your campaign and make sure you have all the tools you need!
- Social listening
We’re not just talking about hearing what your friends have to say about that new jacket you just bought. Social Listening means actually monitoring conversations people have on social media. It is searching for hashtags, keywords and mentions that might be relevant to your business. This is important because you want to be aware of what is going on in your surroundings to ensure your content is relevant by always posting useful and interesting information, and to follow your competitors strategies in order to gain wisdom from them.
There are a lot of social listening tools out there. Pick the one of your choice and begin your research!
In short, make sure to pay special attention to:
- Mentions of your product and/or brand
- Competitor and partners
- Industry news
Or really any information going around on social media that you feel it’s relevant to your marketing strategy, and that could improve your content. It can be anything from a single hashtag on Twitter, from a discussion about your product on a random online forum.
2. Analyze what you’ve found… and use it!
Here it’s important to notice if what you found carries sentiment or feedback about your product. Are people saying good things about your service or complaining about it? Write it down, and even discuss it with your team. Listening to your customer’s suggestions might be a great place to start improving your brand, or making some adjustments.
It’s also important to notice which trends are going around. This might be just the inspiration you needed to launch a new product or service and to identify the new audience you are trying to reach.
You also need to be on the lookout for new customers, so make sure to track phrases potential buyers would use. Are people asking or suggesting something specific? Again, report it back to your team. Make sure you are not missing any leads!
Last, but not least, keep an eye open for any updates relating to the industry. Perhaps there is a new competitor in town, or perhaps your customers have come up with a new way to call your product. Anything that should be on your next social listening is important to keep track of.
- 3. Update your content Calendar and schedule your posts!
Here’s when you get to work with what you found. Set up your content for the week or month. If you have already done this step, this is when you can include new hashtags to your posts, proofread your text and make sure your visuals are ready to go.
We know many starter businesses don’t have much time to work on their content, so remember you can also work with user-generated-content, memes and beautiful images created easily. On the last item, we recommend using our image editing tool, ArtStudio, where you’ll find several layouts and models to work with!
Once you get everything ready, you can easily set up a spreadsheet or .csv file with your posts and schedule them all at once using Postcron. You can literally schedule a month’s worth of content in a few minutes! And from then on, Postcron does it for you!
Depending on the size or niche of each enterprise, the daily number of posts and even the social network may vary. But until you reach your ideal combination, you might want to start with:
- Posting 3 or more times a day on Twitter
- Posting 2x a day on Facebook
- Posting 1x a day on LinkedIn
- Posting 1 or 2 times a day on your Instagram feed and up to 4 times on your Stories.
- Posting 5 or more times a day on Pinterest
- Turn your customers into friends. Engage with your audience!
Take some time to reply to your comments. Respond to questions, like and share posts of your interest. The more you engage with your customers, the more they will be interested in engaging with you.
It’s really important to give your customers a positive experience, and a great way to do this is to communicate with your audience and to make them feel like a real person is engaging with them (even if you are simply using response templates to speed up your work).
We strongly encourage you to do this, especially shortly after you’ve posted something, to keep your audience online and spark curiosity from other followers.
In conclusion…
As you can see, it’s much easier to navigate through the social media sea when you know your headings. Hopefully, we’ve enlightened your journey with this article.
Once you set up your goal, organize your tasks and get everything ready, you’ll be able to put your social media game on the spot, where it always should have been.
We wish you the best of luck!