Social media can be a powerful tool for accomplishing goals, but it can just as easily be a distraction rather than a benefit. Using social media properly involves careful positioning and implementing deliberate strategies to achieve the desired results.
Successful brands will see themselves become common topics of online conversation, whereas unsuccessful brands will feel like they are playing to an empty concert hall. The difference lies in wielding social media in a way that generates a response with online communities. Here are some steps to help leverage social media to increase brand awareness:
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Start with Explicit Goals
The path to success can never be charted without a destination. Brands that want to achieve success should first be able to define what success looks like. Whether that is creating the biggest fanbase, generating sizeable engagement, increasing inbound leads or getting online press exposure from social media activities, individual goals depend on the business. Set goals and decide on KPIs to measure attainment before blindly foraying into the social media jungle.
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Find Your Audience
A business’s customer base and their social media audience should be one and the same. Too often, a brand will trigger a ton of shares and exposure but with the wrong audience. While this strategy could always mean an expanded demographic, it usually ends up creating a lot of wasted effort.
Instead, brands should look at their sales data to pick out the type of customers they resonate with most. They should then research what sort of content and social media activities these groups favor. Analytics and demographic research will prove the business right or wrong later, but they will need a baseline to get started.
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Remember That “Spam” is a Four Letter Word
Treating social media like PPC or regular ads is misusing the venues’ strengths. Hard selling is a distinct “no no” that will distract audiences from finding content they want. Everything a brand posts should have some sort of value. That value can stem from general information to entertainment to specific product information, but the key is to never overstep the bounds of persuasion. Let the audience come to their own conclusions and try to mix up branded info with something everyone can enjoy or get use out of.
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Go Deeper with Content
A brand has a unique offering of values and services. Any content they produce or publish should reflect that uniqueness by exploring content from their own particular angle. Re-sharing is okay in moderation, but even then the caption used should offer something new to the conversation rather than jumping on the bandwagon. Even better, brands should be able to respond to trends rather than repeat them. For example, many companies responded to Apple’s “bendgate” controversy with funny or intriguing perspectives.
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Divide and Conquer
Almost everybody is on social media. Brands can often leverage these tools best if they try to offer content that can appeal to multiple demographics. Additionally, certain services like Instagram have different strengths compared to others like LinkedIn. All branded materials should be able to play to these strengths and resonate with several core audiences at once.
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Be Consistent
Even when playing to different audiences or strengths of a social media service, the message must always ring true to your brand’s values. Software tools like those available from Digital Social Retail can keep track of multiple formats of digital and social media posting so that nothing gets jumbled or conflicted.
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Post Nearly Every Day
Online presence adds value to the customer base’s experience with a brand. To get the best results, that brand should reinforce the positive online experience as often as possible.
Develop a content queue to keep the posting coming. You can use both built-in and third-party tools to line up the content you want to be posted at a specific time or frequency. Brands should supplement queued content with fresh, up-to-the-minute responses to news and relevant industry developments.
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Optimize Your Website
Part of the goal of social media campaigns is to pull more visitors to your branded site. Make sure your site can handle the traffic and that it can meet the functional and aesthetic expectations of your expanded audience. Otherwise, success on the social media front can be squandered by a frustrating or unattractive website experience.
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Let Your Social Media Campaign Work with Other Efforts   Â
Part of being consistent means letting your multiple conversations work in tandem. In other words, paid radio advertisements, in-store displays and digital marketing should offer a similar product with the experience tailored to the venue’s individual strengths. Research shows that social media works best when coupled with other campaigns like PPC and on-site or in-store branding
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Use Analytics at Every Stage
Online activities like social media posting can generate a huge amount of data. Take advantage of this data to find out what is working and what is not. Metrics like conversion rates, engagement and lead increases can all be charted against spikes in social media activity. By keeping an eye on your data, your business has a powerful ally in learning how to reach their market more effectively.
Digital Social Retail’s software suite offers robust analytics in both raw form and informative presentations. The dashboard allows businesses to manage their social media posting in conjunction with other online and offline marketing efforts, all with revealing metrics at every step of the way. Visit our product page to find out more about how a comprehensive solution can simplify your digital campaigns and help make them as effective as possible.
