Are you looking for ways to improve your social media marketing? Perhaps you’re not generating desired results from your efforts or you’re not sure where to begin to amplify your current strategy. With social media playing a big role in a digital marketing strategy and reaching today’s consumer, it’s critical to have a working plan that engages and successfully promotes your brand.
The good news is, by following some best practices, you can start to turn your social media marketing results around. In fact, here are five simple ways to bolster your strategy and produce favorable outcomes on social media:
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#1 Go Live!
Did you know social users would prefer to watch a live video as opposed to reading a blog (80%) or social media post (82%)? In fact, live video is so popular that Facebook gives it prominence over other content in your newsfeed!
What does this mean for your social media marketing? Leveraging live videos will help you stand out and get noticed on social. It builds trust, engages your audience, and extends your organic reach. Using live video is one of the best content types on social media for brands to build awareness fast.
Here are a few winning ideas to get started:
- Behind-the-scenes access is a huge draw for 87% of audiences. Give viewers an inside look into your business culture and events.
- Launching a new product? Share it on live video. Highlight the benefits and how it differs from competitors.
- How-tos perform incredibly well on social media. Show your followers how to complete a process or achieve a specific goal.
- Answer an FAQ. Common questions from your customers are perfect topics to discuss using live video.
Now, the benefits of using live video in your digital marketing strategy are too grand to ignore. Commit to adding more live content to capitalize on this engagement.
#2 Write Engaging Posts That Drive Action
Your social media marketing strategy must elicit action from its followers. Whether you want people to comment, like, click, or share your content, it’s important to keep your goal in mind when crafting your post.
You see, it’s not enough to just post on social media. Social media must encourage action from its viewers in order to be effective. This is how you move closer to achieving your ultimate business objectives from your social media marketing.
With that said, the following are engaging post ideas that typically drive responses:
- Ask questions. People love to offer their opinion when prompted. Give them a reason to do so, right on social media. FYI: close-ended questions get 255% more clickthroughs than open-ended ones.
- You’ll never go wrong posting helpful tidbits that are industry-related. Again, focus on common questions your audience is asking. Doing so positions you as a resource and expert in your niche.
- Inspiring quotes still work but tell your followers why this quote is important to your brand. Offer some insight and how it aligns with your values. This is a perfect opportunity for your fans to learn more about who you are, fostering that ‘know, like, and trust factor.
- Promote your blog content by sharing sound bites from your article.
#3 Use a Variety of Content Formats
The beauty of social media is that you can switch up your content types to give your followers a bit of variety rather than the same old. You’ll also appeal to more of your audience because you’re catering to different learning styles.
While some may enjoy reading a social or blog post, most may prefer a video or visual format. You also add zest to your timeline and make it more interesting.
Therefore, commit to using multiple content formats in your social media marketing as opposed to just the standard image or text post. Converting your blog post into an infographic, for example, would perform well if shared on Pinterest. (In fact, HubSpot reports that infographics are liked and shared on social media 3 times more than any other type of content.)
Short snippet videos are also excellent content pieces for social media marketing. Keep them at about 15-30 seconds for better performance.
Polls and surveys work well for gaining customer insights while getting them engaged with your brand. You can create one right on the Facebook platform or use a tool like Typeform to create your own to share. Other ideas include image collages and sharing audio. There are several ways to mix it up…and your followers will love it!
#4 Be Social…and Consistent!
Did you know the more you interact and respond to comments on social, the better organic reach and visibility that post will have? Additionally, it will show Google’s search algorithm that your content is meaningful and will grant you greater reach on your next post.
Therefore, taking the time to converse with your followers is a simple yet profound tip you can employ to improve your social media marketing. It will encourage people to keep on commenting because they know you’ll respond back. So, you’ll hone relationships, increase your influence, and attract even more followers to your content.
Besides, this is social media! And your followers would love to hear from you.
Equally important is maintaining consistency in your social media cadence. Just to preface, gone are the days where you need to post several times a day to gain traction on your pages. Quality is better than quantity. Yet, it’s vital to have a consistent presence to show that you are active on that platform.
A good practice is to spend one day creating and scheduling your social media content for the week or the next two weeks. Leverage tools like CoSchedule, Buffer, or HootSuite to advance your social strategy.
Not only can you plan your content in advance, but the analytics are super helpful to let you know when your audience is most active and the types of posts they gravitate to the most.
#5 Fully Optimize Your Business Profile
Many times, if a follower is intrigued by your content, they’ll visit your profile page to learn more about your business. Needless to say, your profile must be informative and offer a way to capture their contact info.
You see, fully optimizing your business profiles positions you to drive traffic, collect leads, build relationships, and generate sales. Each of these elements is a big goal of any digital marketing plan.
So, here are a few strong tips to optimize your social profiles to bolster your social media marketing:
- Be sure that every field is complete when detailing your business. When giving the business description, highlight how your products or services help solve problems in your industry as opposed to just giving general info about your brand. People want to know what’s in it for them.
- On Instagram, mention 2-3 industry-related hashtags. In March, the platform introduced this feature of including hashtags in profiles to further boost visibility in search.
- Instead of including a link to your primary website, drive social traffic to a specific capture page link that gives an exclusive offer for that network. Your free offer could include a video email series, discount or special pricing, an ebook, or a template.
- On Facebook, encourage your customers to share positive reviews to boost credibility and online reputation.
Conclusion – Ramp Up Your Digital Marketing Strategy in 2020!
These tips provide an excellent start to ramping up your social media marketing in 2020! With implementation, consistency, and testing, you’ll begin attracting more of your ideal audience to your content and drive better engagement.
You’ll also improve your overall digital marketing strategy. In fact, if you’re wondering how you can improve your digital marketing, contact us for a free consultation. We’ll show you how to get in front of your audience and boost your traffic and lead generation to create real results online.
