7 Tips to Leverage Your Social Media Presence

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. Use these key tips to help you craft an effective social media presence:

1. Identify Your Audience

• • Understand who your target audience is. Consider what excites them and how you might serve them through social media platforms.
  • Experiment with different types of posts using images, video, testimonials, and informative content that applies to your audience. For example: pictures of products can be very popular.
  • Personalize the company to 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 key word 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, previously the platform of choice for B2B businesses, has fallen off in usage, but can still be worthwhile.
    • Facebook is useful 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, like:
    • • 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.
    • Customer testimonials show your leadership in delivery, quality, customer service, and other strengths.
  • Thought Leadership and Informational Content: Create articles, blogs, or case studies to post to your website and share through social media, including a link to the content on your website. Include tips, how-tos, and industry insights. Use keywords which 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 video and images. Great interaction!!

4. Post Consistently - Use a content calendar (i.e., Hootsuite or similar software) to plan 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, friends, business and personal, 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 (impressions, likes, clicks), reach, and conversions. The majority of social media schedulers provide metrics that you can customize to your needs, and Google analytics will track traffic to your pages. LinkedIn also does a great job with site, post, and competitor analytics. Beware - we have found that LI can perceive industry orgs as a competitor – so it takes product/company insight to ignore those “competitors.”
  • Use ow.ly or other link shorteners to track whether the reader just clicked on a picture or actually 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 to your page or website.
  • Based on the data, adjust your content strategy to optimize performance and achieve your goals whether it’s increased 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. Keeping your social media fresh and up to date will help you to grow engagement with your audience. Let us know if we can help!!