You’d be hard-pressed to find a business owner or marketer who isn’t already well aware of social media’s importance to their business. But even the savviest marketing teams can struggle to use social media effectively, whether they’re having difficulty maintaining a rich presence on four different platforms or simply can’t think of anything to say consistently.
If you’re feeling a bit burnt out or lost in social media, the following six tips will straighten you out.
Make Your Profiles Stand Out
Detailed profiles for all of your social media pages are crucial from a user standpoint. After all, the more details you have, the more likely you’ll be to use keywords the search algorithms can rank and links to your wider digital presence, so your followers can tap into your entire online brand.
But beyond just this, you want to make sure that your profiles set you apart from your competitors in terms of your voice and the imagery you use. Your profiles should of course be polished (no typos!) and as personalized as you can get while still being professional.
Utilizing tools like EssayPay for content creation can enhance this process. Expert writers from EssayPay can craft compelling and unique content tailored to your brand’s personality. These content, combined with meticulous attention to detail, ensure that your social media profiles resonate with your audience. Plus, they can provide high-quality content that maintains a consistent tone and style across platforms.
Use details and a sentence-long anecdote that is unique to you or your brand. Make sure your profile photo and cover shot are professionally done, maintaining consistent color branding across platforms.
If you display a logo, make sure that’s professionally designed as well. Keep your profile updated with new information and photos in your gallery as well. If you have a local business and are on Google+, make sure to Google it, so you can be sure all of your profile images are nicely cropped in the search carousel.
Your profile is the first thing a customer will see, so you want to hit out of the park!
Respond…NOW
Okay, maybe not now-now, but quickly. When customers connect with your brand on social media, it’s not just because they want to see what you’re sharing. Rather, many customers use social media as a customer service tool. Given its public nature, that means your brand can look pretty bad pretty fast if you’re not responding, especially if the customer is escalating their communication either with frequent messages or by posting on other sites.
You’ll have a much better interaction if you can mitigate the situation quickly. You may even want to make a separate customer service account just for that purpose, like Microsoft Xbox support.
Responsiveness is also important when the interaction is positive. A customer who leaves a compliment will feel miffed if you don’t thank them for it promptly. What’s more, leaving a customer hanging means losing out on an opportunity to form a real relationship and build community. So set aside several periods each day to respond.
Use Recent Events to Create Relevant Content to Share
Whether you’re on a mission to drive more website traffic via your social platforms or out to attract new followers, tapping into recent events and major news stories is a great way to create and promote relevant content. As an example, take a look at the mobile security company Lookout. First off, they created a piece of content on mobile theft.
While this resource is certainly useful, the Lookout social media team was able to gain more traction and engagement by repurposing the content to be relevant to the World Cup—which was ongoing at the time. The social team then created a Slideshare using that new content.
The Lookout team made sure their content was relevant to World Cup fans before sharing it on social. For instance, tips included: safety tips for big crowds, staying off of unknown networks, and not downloading from foreign app stores.
Altogether, these are exactly the kinds of tips a huge percentage of people were looking for at the time, which is probably why Slide Share itself shared the presentation on its feed.
Ultimately, Lookout was able to repurpose its existing content and use a trending event to attract attention on Twitter, Facebook, and Slideshare, gaining them new followers and expanding brand awareness.
While newsjacking does present some pitfalls, it’s an excellent strategy for curating and sharing content, as long as you frame it in a way that’s relevant to your followers and won’t be seen as opportunistic.
Find Inspiration in Your Followers’ Tweets
Another great place to find content ideas to share or write about yourself is your own followers’ social media feeds. If you’ve grown your network strategically, following only the most relevant fans and focusing on your core offerings, your network is a gold mine, filled with people who are actively asking questions or posting opinions that are relevant to your business.
So take the time each week or even each day to see what they’re asking who they’re responding to, and what they’re liking or favoring so that you can create or curate your own content so that it’s most relevant to their interests.
Pay Attention to Shares
Who is re-sharing your posts? When are they sharing them? What kind of posts are most often reshared, and which ones drive the most traffic? These are all questions for your Analytics, though you can also get a quick sense of the kind of content your followers are liking with a glance at the reshare/retweet and like/favorite stats. Both will give you a good grasp of what your followers are engaging with the most, and therefore what kind of content you should create for sharing in the future.
Keep in mind, kind of like the Lookout example above, you can always repurpose your content, approaching it through a different lens, with a different theme, or via a different structure to make it new and interesting, while still tapping into those same interests.
Make the Most of Social Media Tools
Just going to say this one frankly: if you’re not using Hootsuite, your everyday social media strategy is far more cumbersome than it needs to be. Hootsuite provides numerous functionalities, but its most powerful feature is its simplest: combining all of your social media feeds into one dashboard, to be easily thumbed through and updated. It also allows you to schedule updates, so you can load them all up at once and concentrate on other tasks throughout the day (this is great from a distraction standpoint). It also now has Nimble integrated, which helps you zero in on specific important relationships you want to make sure you build well.
There are a host of other excellent tools, but one of my favorites for Twitter is JustUnfollow — essential for building an engaged following. With JustUnfollow, you can see who you’re following that isn’t following you back, and you can easily unfollow them right from the platform. This makes it much easier to even out your follower/following ratio. You can also see which of your followers are inactive (no use following them if they’re not even there). You can identify new followers by copying other people’s followers or by entering keywords. Overall, it’s a streamlined and powerful way to grow an engaged network.
In Short
From Facebook to Twitter and Pinterest, social media is a powerful way to grow your customer base and build a community around your brand. With these six tips, you’ll have an avid following in no time!