7 Tips to Leverage Your Social Media Presence
Creating social media posts to gain awareness for small to medium B2C or B2B companies requires strategy and planning, in addition to execution. Use these key tips to help you craft an effective social media presence:
1. Identify Your Audience
Consider your product or service and understand who your target audience is. What seems to excite them and how you might serve them through social media platforms?
Experiment with different types of posts using images, videos, testimonials, and informative content that applies to your audience. For example: pictures of products can be very popular.
For one client, personalize the company to its followers with employee intros and tips from the employee – very popular.
News about a new product, new location or new employee also grabs attention. If you haven’t noticed – the keyword is “new.”
2. Choose the Right Platforms
Determine the social media platforms that your target audience frequents. Popular options include LinkedIn, X (previously Twitter), Facebook, and YouTube.
LinkedIn is the platform of choice for most B2B businesses and their Sales Reps, Managers, owners, and investors.
X used to be the platform of choice for B2B businesses has fallen off in usage, but can still be worthwhile.
Facebook may appeal if your product can be bought by individual consumers.
YouTube is great for videos, showcasing how your product is made, tutorials, or exciting visual content.
3. Create Engaging Content
Visuals: Visual content is more engaging and shareable. Use high-quality images, videos, and graphics:
New product photos or video
Timeline graphic showing company history
Unusual industry-related video – For a tank manufacturing company, we posted a video of an improperly installed underground tank, rising out of the ground and the disastrous consequences (It wasn’t our client’s product!) and garnered over 20,000 impressions on LinkedIn alone.
Showcases: Develop a weekly showcase, like Tuesday Tips or Thursday Pics that provides your audience with consistent content and may become the most engaging content of the week.
Storytelling – Get Personal: Posts generated by and about your employees help tell the story of why your company is special. Readers love this type of content.
Personal stories help customers, prospects, and fans relate better to your company and your employees
Testimonials from your customers show your leadership in delivery, quality, customer service, or your other strengths
Thought Leadership and Informational Content: Create articles, blogs, or case studies post them to your website, and share them through social media, including a link to the content on your website. Share tips, how-tos, and industry insights. Use keywords that enhance SEO and PPC to get the most bang for your buck – and the ability to analyze results.
Get your Customers Involved: Encourage customers to share their positive experiences with your products and tag you. You can also feature their posts on your page. One of our clients asked customers to post product installation videos and images. Great interaction!
4. Post Consistently
Use a content calendar to plan (i.e., Hootsuite or similar software) and schedule posts to keep your audience engaged. Ensure that you are supporting the overall brand strategy and using a consistent voice and style across all posts to further brand recognition and loyalty. The more you post, the more brand loyalty you can engender.
5. Utilize Hashtags and Keywords
Use popular and relevant keywords for hashtags, captions and descriptions to increase the discoverability and visibility of your posts. Coordinate with your company’s SEO efforts for greatest effectiveness.
6. Engage with Your Audience
Highlight Your Website: Create links to pages on your website so your audience can view your product, read your blogs, articles, and case studies– or find your contact information. This interaction produces greater brand recognition and loyalty.
Invite your colleagues, employees, business (and personal) friends to follow your company’s social media. When they repost your content, it improves name recognition and expands the audience for your company’s offerings and services.
Respond to Comments: Monitor your feeds daily and engage with followers by responding to comments and messages promptly. We inform our clients if clicks are unusually high on a post, or someone responds with a question about price or availability – a great lead!
7. Track Performance, Analyze and Adjust
Use analytics to monitor the performance of your posts. Pay attention to engagement rates (i.e., impressions, likes, clicks), reach, and conversions. Google Analytics will track traffic to your pages and most social media schedulers will have analytics that you can cater to your needs. LinkedIn also does a great job with site, post, and competitor analytics. Beware - we have found that LI can perceive industry organizations as a competitor – so it takes product/company insight to ignore those “competitors.”
Use ow.ly or other shorteners to track whether the reader just clicked on a picture or went to your website. Hootsuite analytics has separate graphs for post clicks and ow.ly link clicks so that you can easily see who clicked on your page or website.
Based on the data, adjust your content strategy to optimize performance and achieve your goals whether it’s greater brand recognition, more visits to your website, or even sales leads.
Finally, stay on top of trends and updates to stay effective in your social media strategy. The social media platforms are constantly changing rules and algorithms. By continuously refining your approach based on feedback and analytics, you can effectively use social media to increase awareness for your company, grow your network, and gain leads. Contact us today to learn how we can help.