Everyone knows that social media is where it’s. If you want your company to grow, you need to leverage its power. But how can you use this tool to its fullest?
Yes, the number of follows, shares, and likes are important, but the credibility of a company isn’t determined solely by these metrics. Today, social media demands specific skills where brands understand audience needs.
Here are some strategies that you can implement right now. These tips apply to any company – from those starting out or are already well-established.
Use Chatbots
You’ve seen these guys pop up on sites more and more, and it makes sense. These are some of the best digital tools out there to communicate directly and resolve problems that customers may have. But what’s nice is that chatbots can handle these issues without you having to step in at any point.
And while chatbots can seem like this complex thing, they require no coding knowledge and come with other perks like:
- Answers customer questions.
- Takes orders directly through Facebook Messenger and comments.
- Integrates with any major payment systems.
On top of that, chatbots have an air of familiarity compared to automated messages. AI has come a long way and can provide a more human feel.
Strive to make the Experience Personalized for visitors
Chatbots can automate a lot of tasks, and when you implement them properly, they can create a personalized experience for customers. The idea behind this is that instead of linking all your marketing efforts to particular landing pages, you have them all point to a window where someone will chat with your chatbot.
Linking ads to chatbots will:
- Break traditional views that customers have that you’re just trying to sell them something
- Personalize the customer experience.
- Boost sales.
- And create a loyal fan base.
Create a Community
While we use followers as a metric, do remember there are real people behind those numbers (unless you’re buying them). Yes, followers are important and determine your reach, but again that’s not the only metric that matters here.
Your audience will do absolutely nothing if you are treating them as means of constantly selling them stuff. Instead, you want to be showing your audience you are more than a robot. What this means is putting your own personality into your content – whether it’s in a tweet, post, or article.
By integrating your personality, humour and emotions, people can better relate to your brand. Businesses today need to understand that people want to feel like they’re part of something, more than just as a money making tool for you.
On top of that, social media is all about being social. If they see the same sort of posts over and over again, they’re going to lose interest. Here are some ways to make communications more interactive:
- Ask questions to your audience.
- Get opinions on various matters.
- Share other information from other sources outside of what you’re providing to people.
- Liking and sharing posts that your audience has gone and posted.
- Ask people directly by including in post likes or shares.
Step up your Overall Content
People respond to fun videos, good imagery and podcasts. While you may have ironed out a solid content strategy, remember that repeating the same stuff cause people to lose interest. So step up your content by placing in videos, other graphics, or even throwing in your podcast episodes if you’ve got that.
This type of content can help to round out the personality of your brand too. Regardless, remember that people respond to various mediums, so always be mixing it up.
Make Profiles on your relevant Channels
While some would argue it’s worth dabbling in every social media channel available, the truth is that’s a lot to manage. Unless you have a massive team able to churn out content for you on each platform, it’s going to be tough to stay relevant on every single one.
Instead, it’s worth looking at who you are as a person or company, where you’re getting the most attention, and where your audience typically spends their time. This is not only smarter for you but smarter for your employees if you’ve got some social media folks in your midst helping with posts.
By focusing on a select few platforms, you are putting your efforts into places that truly matter.
To do this, look at your business and what type of follower each platform attracts. For example, if you sell clothing, you probably won’t get much luck on LinkedIn. But if you’re selling writing services or services to enhance businesses, you’d have better odds there. Similarly, if you are selling crafts or artwork, Instagram and Pinterest are up your alley. Even platforms like Twitter and Facebook would work too.
Put together a Social Media Budget
Obviously, social media is marketing at its core for businesses; and like with any marketing plan, it’s smart to have an appropriate budget. Putting numbers in place will ensure that whenever you take action on a campaign or consider some other marketing tactic, you will try to make the most of it.
By quantifying and placing a limit on spending, we are ensuring that we get the most for what we pay for.
Over time, the more restriction you place on your budget, the more creative you could get with the budget to appeal to your target audience.
Run Cross-channel Campaigns
If you want to engage with your audience even more, consider cross-channel campaigns. It’s similar to recycling content where you run a campaign over the social media channels you’re on.
Although this strategy isn’t quite new, many companies do this already, but you can give yourself an edge by adding emotional components to these campaigns. The key is for the people to relate to your cause. To do this you must:
- Tell an engaging story to move and mobilize your audience.
- Link the campaign to a particular landing page that’ll provide your audience more information about it.
- Have both a unique and memorable name for the campaign that also has a relevant hashtag(s).
Leverage your Audience
The companies that are getting ahead are not the ones who are focused on amassing followers, but getting them to do something. This can be done by creating a personality and conveying that through a variety of ways.
If you’re looking to grow your business more, take to heart these strategies and implement them into your business. By the end of this, you’ll have a solid social media plan that you can use time and time again.