When done properly, building a brand on social media can pay dividends for your business and ensure you are successful for years to come. However, a single misstep can result in customers losing trust in what you offer.
Lock in the Purpose of the Brand
If your brand has no purpose, it’s the same as a captain of a ship without a compass. Before you try to map out your content strategy, look at the values, vision, and mission of your business. By addressing this in the beginning and putting a priority on it, you will have an easier time understanding what your brand should do and say on social and how to answer important questions, including how to communicate authentically as a brand.
From this point, you can begin to develop a
voice and style naturally that resonates through the lens of your purpose in a way that ensures your audience knows they are heard and that they are sharing this journey with you. In this way, your strategies will go much deeper than just how you are talking. It turns into a matter of how you set people up for success and productivity with the content you share.
Post a Minimum of Once a Day
Today is the digital age where the pace of information continues to increase, it’s necessary to get your timing and frequency right. By posting at least one time a day, your audience will get to a point where they anticipate the content you post. This also helps you set your brand apart from the competition. If you are managing several platforms, this otherwise easy task may feel daunting and difficult to nail down into a disciplined and organized regimen. If you want a better way to manage this, be sure to use one of the scheduling tools that are available.
Along with these tools, though, you can’t shirk the responsibility of creating and managing your content calendar. This is a living and breathing document that will help you maintain a tally of your posts and help you detail the essential elements, such as the topics you choose and how many posts you have created.
You can use this document to determine if your mix of content is diverse enough. If there are any gaps you can fill in, you can find them here. You will also discover where you need to make adjustments based on what content
gets the most engagement.
The posts you create for social media need to be a good mix of things like:
- Video
- Industry Stats
- Animations
- Client Feedback
- Questions For Your Audience
- Polls and Surveys
With the right mix of content, keeping your audience interested and engaged will be easy.
Use Metrics to Map Strong Engagement
Your business is unique and there are many marketing benchmarks you need to track to ensure that your efforts are achieving the goals you have set. After all, different objectives will result in different outcomes.
For example, if you are trying to boost brand awareness, you will probably use paid media to expose your content to the most people possible. However, when it comes to engagement, you need to make sure your marketing efforts are delivered to the right audience. Every effort you make, you need to measure the results you achieve, which will also let you know when adjustments should be made.
If you want to create an effective
social media marketing plan, there are more than a few factors to keep in mind. The tips and information here will help you get started and ensure that your social media strategy helps you achieve the results that you are after.
Identify Your Target Audience
The first step of creating a
social media strategy for your brand is identifying your target audience. Whether you’re a business leader or marketing executive, this task should be relatively straightforward. However, the real challenge is compiling specific data about your target audience to create content that tailors to their interest.
Anyone can quickly state that their products are geared toward younger people or women, but can you specifically define your target audience? The reason why this is important because most social media marketing platforms require advertisers to define their audiences with demographics, behaviors, and other pertinent information.
Facebook’s advertising tool is a great example of a platform that requires marketers to target specific audiences.
Now that you know, defining your target audience isn’t difficult. Finding answers to the following questions should make this activity much easier.
- What is the age of your average customer (a rough guess will do)?
- What is their profession?
- Are they married?
- What is their race?
- Do they have advanced degrees or basic education?
- What is their financial standing (how much do they make?)
Any rough estimate will suffice here. The goal of this exercise is to define your typical customer so that you’re able to create content and ads that will interest them.
Understand Each Social Media Network
Understand that you might not find a use for every social media network. In fact, there may not be any point in you trying particular networks like
LinkedIn or
Instagram. Each social media network has a different purpose.
Each also has a different audience. If your target audience isn’t using a platform, then it wouldn’t make much sense for you to invest in it. Here are the specifics of each social media platform, which include the purpose and audience.
In the previous exercise, you should have already defined your target audience. Quickly check and see if they are using each of these social media networks according to the graphic above and build your strategy accordingly.
Define Your Goals
Ultimately, what are you trying to achieve with your social media marketing strategy? Here are a few reasons why businesses use social media to promote their brand:
- Building brand awareness
- Engaging their audience
- Attracting potential customers to their website
What is your ultimate goal for using
social media for your business? Pick any of the objectives above or create your own. Next, set up key performance indicators (KPIs) that will allow you to measure your progress towards achieving your goal.
For example, your KPI could be that you want to accumulate 50 Facebook shares every month. Completing this KPI would put you on your way to achieving your ultimate goal of building more brand awareness.
Set a Budget
After defining your goals, you’ll need to determine how much it will cost to accomplish them. If you’re planning on creating ads, you should plan ahead of how many ads you want to launch and how much money you want to spend initially.
There isn’t any rhyme or rhythm to creating a social media marketing budget. Begin by using a test budget and experiment with in-house marketing strategies. This will allow you to test the waters and decide if you want to continue with those strategies and spend more or less of your money.
Do You Want to Learn More?
Planning the steps of your social media marketing strategy can take a lot of time and effort. If you don’t have the time or expertise to get the job done, then we can help! Click
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How to Ask the Right Questions to Your Instagram Followers
Asking questions on social media is a great way to engage your audience. Companies ask questions all of the time to get responses from their followers. Sometimes brands ask general questions for marketing purposes.
Every business is different. To find out what works for you, here are some ways you can ask the right questions to your Instagram followers.
Spy on Your Competitors
It doesn’t make much sense to get inspiration from companies outside of your industry. These companies have different target audiences - what works for them will not work for you.
Nonetheless, you can learn how to ask the right questions by seeing what your competitors are doing. If your most successful competitors are using emojis, try it out and see if the strategy works for you.
Otherwise, you can use social media competitor analysis tools like Sprout Social and Social Blade to gain insights on your competitors to receive a competitive edge.
Try Instagram Stories
Instagram users actually pay attention to company Instagram stories. If you want to engage your audience by asking a mix of different questions, then look no further than Instagram stories.
Try Instagram Animations
Instagram has recently provided another helpful feature to allow users to post animated stories. Users can create stylish and eye-catching posts for their audiences.
In these stories, you can post text-based questions with compelling visuals to draw attention to your post. Animated Instagram stories aren't a widely-used feature yet. That means that there is a great chance your competitors aren’t using this technique.
Check the Comments
If no one is paying attention to your questions, you’ll know. Instagram is one of the most vibrant social media profiles out there. Users regularly comment on other content. In fact, commenting is a regular Instagram practice.
If no one is responding to your question, then it’s safe to say that it hasn’t interested your audience.
That’s alright!
Keep asking questions and creating social media content for your brand. Eventually, more people in your audience will follow you and interact with your content. Remember to take solace in the fact that building a large Instagram presence takes a full commitment of time and resources.
Receive More Instagram Followers Today!
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Using Animations on Twitter: 5 Best Practices
Visual social media posts have been long reported to lead to tremendous results for businesses in various industries. Some noteworthy visual social media content statistics include:
- 70% of businesses invest in visual content marketing techniques (HubSpot)
- 32% of marketers say that visual images have more potential than blogs (Social Media Examiner)
- Consumers retain information better through visual content rather than text (Brain Rules)
1. Use Slideshows
Slideshows can help you present a wide variety of different products in a display-like setting. For eCommerce brands, slideshows are a great tool for you to showcase your best products for sale.
Plenty of companies use slideshows to advertise their promotions.
Some also use slideshows to show users how great their products will look in potential customers’ homes.
However you choose to use slideshows, make sure you are putting forth high-quality images that will give off a great first impression of your business.
2. Use Text-Based GIFs
GIFs are some of the most popular image formats on Twitters. Implementing the use of text-based GIFs will help you get your message across in just a few words like this company did.
With that said, here are some tips to help you get started using text-based GIFs in your social media strategy.
- Choose complimentary colors that align with your brand.
- Use clean typefaces for clarity and brand purposes as well.
- Keep it simple. Don’t use too much text.
Text-based GIFs are usually only a few seconds long. Since Twitter users regularly scroll through hundreds of posts every hour, you can be sure that you GIF will receive the attention it deserves.
3. Use Educational GIFs
You can use GIFs in more ways than entertaining your audience and promoting your brand. In addition, GIFs can be used to communicate small instructions and how-tos at a glance.
This post brilliantly provides a short tutorial of how to perform an exercise. The copy is also simple to read and engages the audience.
4. Get Trendy
Millennials and Gen Zers make up most of Twitter’s diverse population. If your social media content strategy is going to be successful, it should resonate strongly with these audiences.
Study popular animation styles on Twitter and make improvements to your own strategy to achieve better results with your campaign.
5. Spy on Your Competitors
Competitor analysis is a huge aspect of building the perfect social media strategy. If you want to find the best Twitter animations in your industry, you can typically find a few on competitor profiles.
Take notes of how your competitors are using their animations and devise ways of how you can do better.
Improve Your Twitter Animations Today!
These five tips will put you on your way to growing your influence on Twitter. Give us a call today at (480) 907-0630 to speak to a member of our team today. Alternatively, you can click
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How to Drive New Twitter Followers With Industry Stats
An important thing to note here is that Twitter is a hub of celebrities and influencers. Your content strategy should involve content that will provide value to them. Publishing industry stats will help you reach like-minded people and brands in your niche and foster vibrant engagements.
Are you curious about using industry stats to drive new Twitter followers for your company? This guide will show you all of the steps of turning your goal into a reality.
Use Relevant Hashtags
One of the disadvantages of posting industry stats is that many of your competitors are likely already doing it. This technique breeds a lot of competition. To keep your brand visible, use relevant hashtags to promote your content to users with similar interests.
Well-known companies like Disney and Apple have the luxury of posting social media content without any hashtags and aggregate tons of engagements. Your business doesn’t have that benefit.
Use a maximum of four different hashtags to avoid spamming your content and experiment with different hashtags for better results.
Use a Hook to Grab Attention
Again, posting industry stats on Twitter is nothing new. To make your posts stand out, get creative and use a captivating hook to grab your audience’s attention. Sometimes the best hooks are the most simple ones.
This post performed remarkably well because Brian got right to the point and presented the stats in plain English that’s easy to scan and comprehend. Twitter circulates through millions of posts every minute.
A post like this can quickly capture a viewer’s attention. You should try doing the same to achieve similar results.
See What Your Competitors are Doing
Not all businesses are the same. Naturally, you wouldn’t present industry stats in the weight loss industry the same way you would in the marketing industry. For this reason, you should see what your most successful competitors are doing and copy their techniques.
Competitor analysis is nothing new. The most successful brands use this method all of the time to surpass their competitors and achieve more influence. See how your competitors are posting industry stats and take notes on their key methods.
Tag Influencers
Now, here is an underrated tip. When you tag someone on Twitter, your post will inadvertently show up for searches of that user. This means if you tag LeBron James, your post will show up for related searches for LeBron James.
This is free real estate for brands that want their posts to be seen by the fans of influencers in their industry. Tag influencers when posting industry stats to increase your visibility among people more likely to interact with your content.
Grow Your Twitter Followers Today!
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How to Use Video on Social Media
To help you get started, here is everything you need to know how to create and use video content on your social media platforms.
Use a High-Quality Camera
However, to achieve the highest-quality videos, purchase a professional camera. If you’re not sure of where to look, there are countless online buying guides to point you in the right direction.
Invest in Top-Notch Video Editing Software
Video marketing takes a collaborative effort across multiple platforms. You can’t simply record a raw video and post it on social media. Instead, get creative and add graphics, animations, and text to your video content.
Video editing software, like iMovie and Adobe, makes it possible to turn any raw video into a work of art that will capture that attention of your audience. Luckily, there are both free and premium options you can choose from to select the perfect video editing software.
To avoid wasting your time, here are some tips for picking an ideal video editing solution:
- Take advantage of the free trial
- Try out the interface. If it’s too confusing or difficult to use, move on.
- Check out online reviews for the software.
- See if there is an online community or customer support team that can answer all potential questions.
Create an Eye-Catching Hook
With that said, use a hook to grab your audience’s attention immediately and keep it until the call-to-action (CTA).
Promote & Measure
Once your video is ready, be sure to promote it with your advertising budget. If you don’t already have a large social media presence, you may waste a lot of time posting content without any boost.
Experiment with different budgets and targeting methods to locate your audience and push your videos unto their feed. Remember that your first video likely won’t be successful.
That’s alright!
Successful marketing campaigns take time. Measure the results from your first campaign, take notes, and improve. The more you experiment, the more you’ll learn about techniques that truly work for your business.
Create Outstanding Videos Today!
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How to Use Client Feedback to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
Successful marketing strategies are usually never set-and-forget campaigns. Rightfully so, you can’t just create a social media marketing strategy and then allow it to run without monitoring it.
Doing so will result in hours of wasted time and vital advertising dollars sent down the drain. The reason why most businesses fail at social media marketing is because they literally don’t know how to improve their campaigns.
Fortunately, a tried and true method of improving a social media strategy is asking for client feedback. Are you curious about learning more? This guide will show you how to use client feedback to grow your social presence.
Reach Out to Client Via Email
Depending on how your sales funnel operates, you should be able to reach out to customers via email. Here are some great practices for contacting old customers and asking them for their feedback on your current social media initiatives.
- Don’t send the same email to all of your customers. This is frankly lazy and can be flagged as spam.
- Take a personalized approach. Craft a different message for each customer, letting them know that you genuinely value their business and desire their feedback.
- Be patient. People receive hundreds of emails every day and may take some time getting back to me.
- Don’t be afraid to follow-up. If you haven’t received a response in a great deal of time, reach back out.
Compile Your Responses
It’s probably best to use a Google form to compile all of your responses. Google Forms allow users to easily collect responses through a simple interface. It can even provide data on multiple-choice questions, allowing you to summarize all of your responses.
If you have the means, you can use a custom web portal to intelligently collect responses from your clients.
Get a Consensus
To get a proper consensus, you’ll need to ask the right questions. Here are necessary questions you need to ask:
- Are you following us on social media? Why or why not?
- What types of content do you like best on our profile?
- Is there anything you would personally change?
- What are your favorite brands on social media?
Getting a consensus on these questions will give you valuable marketing information you can use to improve your campaign. The best part is that you can bypass several months of experimentation and repair broken campaigns in less time.
Monitor & Measure Your Progress
Just because a few clients reach back out to you with feedback doesn’t mean that you’re done editing your campaigns. Alter your campaigns according to the feedback you’ve received and measure your progress over time.
If you’ve achieved success with your strategy, it’s up to you to experiment further and find new ways to reach out to your audience. If this strategy is unsuccessful, try again and collect more responses for a more definite consensus.
Improve Your Social Media Strategy Today!
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Using Polls and Surveys on Social Media: 5 Best Practices
The most successful social media marketing strategies involve diverse types of content. Many companies post videos, ads, memes, and GIFs to build brand awareness and divert web traffic back to their websites.
You can also use polls and surveys to gain more influence on your social media platforms. The challenge here is building polls and surveys your audience will care about and promoting them.
Are you ready to learn how to use polls and surveys to gain a competitive edge in your industry? This guide will show you all of the tricks of growing your social media presence with these types of content.
1. Use Instagram Stories
It’s a little-known secret that polls and surveys are popular social media marketing tools. Social media users see them all of the time, and it’s likely that your competitors are also using them.
To make your content stand out, you should present your poll or survey in a different way. Instagram stories allow users to publish interactive polls and surveys in a stylish fashion.
As you can see, creating a survey on Instagram stories is simple and can generate tons of engagements for your brand.
2. Choose Interesting Topics
It can be difficult to understand what types of poll topics your audience initially wants to see. If you’re completely clueless of what your poll topic should be, simply ask your audience.
This is a perfect example of how you can use polls to advance your
content marketing objectives. This company asked their audience a very similar question and acquired nearly 900 responses.
You can do the same if you’re just beginning to create polls and surveys for your social media profiles.
3. Promote Your Content
If you don’t have a large social media following, promoting your content is in your best interest. This way, you can avoid wasting a lot of time creating posts that no one will see. Set aside a generous amount to promote your polls and surveys and measure your results.
4. Use Captivating Graphics
Typical text-based polls and surveys can be a bit boring for modern audiences. Instagram stories make it possible for users to add stickers to polls to draw more attention to their content.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that a Instagram user would likely click on this poll than a traditional one with a generic background image.
5. Monitor Your Content & Make Improvements
Again, successful marketing strategies require a great deal of experimentation. You will naturally create a lot of polls and surveys that completely miss the mark. This is all a part of the learning curve.
With that said, be sure to monitor your content and make necessary improvements to turn your strategy in the right direction.
Give Your Polls & Surveys a Boost Today!
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