More consumers today are seeking to engage with their favorite brands on social media networks. In fact, research shows that a third of Millennials actually prefer to communicate with businesses via social networks than through other mediums.
For this reason alone, building and maintaining a strong presence on social media is now vital to connecting with your customers, gaining new ones, and increasing awareness to your brand.
And the good news is that there are strategic moves you can make to improve your social media marketing to ensure you're maximizing your business performance - here are four practical ways to improve your social strategy in order to bolster brand credibility, foster engagement and amplify results from your efforts.
1. Leverage a Social Media Management Tool
Apps like Buffer, CoSchedule, and Hootsuite are incredibly useful social media management tools to help you publish content on all your major social networks from one dashboard. Through the use of such tools, you'll be able to improve productivity, while still maintaining connection with your audience.
From scheduling fresh content in advance, providing social analytics, sharing the best times to post, responding quickly to customers and social monitoring, these tools can be extremely useful in managing your social content to help achieve optimal results.
2. Create Exclusive Groups
Social media groups can be excellent platforms for building community around your brand.
By initiating and cultivating conversations, you can help breed brand loyalty, encourage feedback from customers, and keep followers connected with your business. You can also use this channel for members to ask you questions and receive quick responses from you... further humanizing your brand.
One option to consider is to create an exclusive group for your customers on your active social media networks, where you can further enhance brand loyalty by offering valuable, exclusive content and connection with your business leaders.
3. Ramp Up Your Visuals
There's no dispute that adding visuals generates significantly more engagement on social media.
According to Hubspot, Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without. From organic video uploads to GIFs, live-streaming videos, photos, and collages, visuals can have an extraordinary impact in improving your reach and getting audiences aligned with your message.
Video is another key consideration, particularly live-streaming, which is now readily available on several platforms. Research shows that people are spending 3X longer watching live video versus one that's been pre-recorded.
You can use Facebook Live and Instagram Stories to host live Q&A sessions with followers or invite your audience in your office to experience the daily shenanigans and how things work.
Where appropriate, you should also consider publishing GIFs and memes that showcase your brand culture.
Visuals have a way of drawing people in... use them to your advantage.
4. Be Social
Keep in mind that social media is about being 'social'.
People crave authenticity and transparency online. Personally engaging and reaching out to your followers shows that you're relatable and desire real relationships with your audience. Fans are more likely to interact with your content if you're more likely to respond to that engagement.
Here are a few simple things you can do to become more social on your social media networks:
- Like, comment, and share your followers content
- Show customers some love by tagging them in a post and showing appreciation for a positive review or user-generated content shared
- Personally inbox customers giving thanks for a recent order
- Respond to comments or when people use your brand hashtag in a post
Conclusion
Regardless of your industry, your customers are on social media. The key to capitalizing on this fact is ensuring that your social media strategy is consistently growing your following, boosting engagement, and increasing brand exposure.
Implementing these simple tips will help improve your marketing process so you're generating real results from your social efforts.