Social Media – finding the right approach
We are no longer living in the days of passive marketing. Today, it is crucial for every business success to go social, be active, and stay connected. A recent study by Business Insider found that an average of 74% of internet use is for social media. E-mail and online messaging constitute a big part of this usage.
A smart and well-designed social media strategy can help a brand to increase exposure, improve search engine ranking, and produce more leads. If you sweet-talk your customers and stick by your words, you can turn your Facebook and Twitter followers into genuine customers.
The key is to curate your brand’s social media business success strategy with precision. An intricate pattern of content, promotion, and visual data will prove your value to the prospects. It will also allow you to stand out among your competitors.
The margin of error on social media is very minimal. The last thing you need for your business is to go viral for all the wrong reasons. Therefore, before designing a social media campaign, find out what your audience wants from you and how you can provide the answers to their queries.
In this blog, there are five rules you should follow to avoid all kinds of social media business success faux pas:
- Decide the viable platform
Starting your social media campaign on every platform simultaneously will dilute your brand. It saturates your content-generation capacity, and will gradually decrease the quality and the appeal of your content.
The temptation to have a high number of followers across all the social media platforms often compels brands to go all out with their social media campaigns. It may increase their brand awareness; however, all the efforts go down the drain if they can’t keep all the social platforms aligned.
We suggest you conduct thorough research before you start with your social media campaign. Find out where your target users spend most of their time. You can use analytics to see where your audience spends most of their time.
Finding the right platform that is relevant to your business niche is important. Take the example of Leather Skin Shop. They are a brand that sells men and women leather jackets online. Now, their niche is fashion, and they have identified that most of their targeted audience is found on Instagram.
Therefore, they have optimized their Instagram page and have made it a central part of their overall social media business success campaign. To engage their audience on this platform, they routinely share fashion tips, promote new products, and offer discounts.
The brand also promotes its product on other platforms, but Instagram is its core platform. Focusing more on one platform where most of their target audience is present allows them to improve their outreach and create brand awareness.
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The key here is to stick by your brand and platform requirements. You can use different channels to reach various goals. eMarketer found that more brands use Facebook for customer acquisition, but Instagram for social commerce.
- Generate Relevant Content
Speaking the right things at the right time can make a huge difference in creating your brand’s reputation. It requires you to be smart in your content creation and content promotion.
For instance, research by Sprout Social concluded that the best times to post on Instagram are Wednesday at 11 am and Friday from 10-11 am. Wednesday is the overall best day to post. Meanwhile, Sunday sees the least amount of engagement.
So before you upload something on social media, it is wise to craft content carefully. Make sure it is relevant to the audience. Do you think it fits the culture you work in? Is the tone of your message correct for that specific social network? The response to these questions will act as your filter funnel.
Bear in mind; your social media business success must tick all the content-qualification boxes. Similar to the e-mail marketing campaigns. It has to be:
- Personalized
- Valuable
- Timely
- Informational
The users tend to dismiss an irrelevant post in less than three seconds. Your posts should be catchy enough to attract them in microseconds. For example, Cupshe is killing it with its user-generated content. It brings customers an option to get featured on its official platform.
It lets them create a bond with their audience, while the audience, when they see their content featuring on the brand’s page, feel valued.
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- Provide Quick Response
Your interaction with your customers on social media can be the fuel behind your digital success. It has made business communication a 24-hour commitment. You don’t have a choice to skip queries and comments of your users on social media. If you do so, you end up losing your customers to your competitors.
The latest research by Lithium Technologies reported that 53% of the customers who ask a question from a brand expect answers within an hour. And if the customer makes a complaint, this number rises to 72%.
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Traditionally, businesses have been reluctant to follow-up on the complaints made by customers. Those long, premium-priced calls to customer support are not everyone’s cup of tea. But in these days of social media, a single disgruntled tweet from a customer can raise a storm against you.
The British Gas Twitter meltdown of 2013 is an example of how defamation spreads like wildfire.
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You can avoid major social media blunders by responding to your customers instantaneously. Cross-check and ensure all your statements are factually correct and rectify the errors on your part.
- Don’t Over promote
If you are promoting your brand on the social channel once or twice, it is good. But if you go overboard and triple or quadruple the number, this can become a major turn-off for the followers. Most of them are likely to unfollow you as they want to see other content on their newsfeed as well.
Instead of plastering your logo all over their screen, you should follow a moderate approach. You need to provide exciting content to your customers. It has to be compelling enough to boost their engagement. According to CoSchedule, this is how you should post on each of your social platforms:
- Facebook: 1 post each day
- Twitter: 15 tweets per day
- Pinterest: 11 pins each day
- LinkedIn: 1 post per day
- Instagram: 1 or 2 posts per day
And each of your posts must fit the brand’s identity. Audi, a few years back, tried to fit its marketing campaign with the Emmy buzz circulating House of Cards. It came off awkward because it was irrelevant. It evoked negative feedback from their audience as well.
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- Share Visuals
People expect content on a social platform to contain catchy visuals. More than 50% of the Millenials and GenZ recently, in a report, said that their fashion purchase depends on the images they see on the brand’s page.
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If your post does not look attractive, people won’t stop to read it. Twitter, the text-oriented platform, also states that your tweet gets more attention if it has an image or a GIF on it.
It is, thereby, essential to get a graphic designer on your team. Excellent and effective imagery will allow you to get your message across with much ease. If Heinz ketchup can work up a new photo-based campaign now and then, we are sure you can do it too.
Parting Thoughts – get your creative juices flowin’!
Treading on social platforms is tricky, but it is not something you can’t do. Just keep an eye on your competitor, track the market, consumer demands, and media algorithm modifications. If you create a strategy and stick to it, you will eventually touch the heights you always aspired for.
We hope our blog will help you take your first step. Keep going, and you will finally be there. Let us know how you plan to initiate it.
