Tips to Effectively Use Social Media for Your Business

With the growing popularity of social media, having a social media marketing strategy is a must-have for many business today. There is a lot of potential for new opportunities with a thoroughly planned social media campaign. It can increase sales, drive traffic to your website, improve brand loyalty, and can even help you improve your website’s SEO rankings.

However, for some businesses, it’s a challenge to maintain a social media marketing strategy. How you manage your social media accounts can affect your business’ online presence and reputation, which is why it’s important to use social media the right way for you to reap the best results. Here are tips to effectively use social media for your business:

1. Be consistent with how frequently you post

It’s a common mistake for many businesses to go on days without posting anything, then post several times a day for a time, and then go back to being silent again. An erratic posting schedule could hurt your followership and engagement.

Consistency is essential to the success of any social media campaign. It’s recommended that you create a plan for what you’re going to post and how often you plan to do so. The important thing is to stay committed to your plan. Here are tips on how to plan out your social media posts:

• Have a social media calendar – A social media calendar is a good way to organize your social media content. You can easily create a simple social media calendar using Google Sheets or an actual calendar. Make a list of post types that you would like to share on a regular basis, such as blog posts, quotes, tips, memes, videos, and press releases. Your calendar must contain key dates that are relevant to your business, such as holidays, campaigns, product launches, and events.
• Schedule your posts – You can streamline your social media marketing tasks by scheduling your posts in advance. There are many free and paid social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, but it’s best to find one that works best for your business’ social media goals. Be mindful as well of the best times to post on social media. Each platform has an optimal day and hour to drive more engagement from your audience.

2. Optimize your content for each platform

Another common mistake that businesses make is posting the same content and format across all of their social media accounts. This could lead to some text being cut off, such in the case of the 140-character limit on Twitter versus the support of long-form posts on LinkedIn. Every social media platform has its own set of unique features and limitations that you should consider and adapt to. All of your posts should be optimized for each platform, even when delivering the same message. Here are tips on what content types are best for each social media platform:

• Facebook – Facebook is more versatile in their support of various content types: photos, graphics, videos, and long-form posts.
• Twitter – Due to the character limit, short and snappy posts on Twitter work best. It also supports GIF images, photos, and live videos.
• Instagram – Instagram is focused on visual content, so get creative with your photos and videos.
• LinkedIn – Long-form posts that focus on business and career are recommended.

You can check out this comprehensive cheat sheet for the ideal image sizes for each social media platform: Always Up-to-Date Guide to Social Media Image Sizes by Sprout Social.

3. Regularly engage with your followers

Social media engagement is a core part of any social media marketing strategy, but so many businesses overlook this. Engaging with your followers is essential in building rapport and a long-term relationship with your audience, growing your reach further, and providing customer care. Here are tips on how to engage with your followers effectively:

• Start the conversation – Be proactive in initiating a conversation; don’t wait for your followers to comment, like, or share your posts. Ask questions on your posts, organize contests, tag/mention people in curated content, and encourage user-generated content.
• Listen attentively/actively – It’s important to include social media monitoring in your strategy. Spare some time each day to read through comments and reply/address concerns whenever needed. Actively listening to your audience is also a good opportunity to identify issues in real-time. Even complaints can be an opportunity to address problems quickly, and turn a negative into a positive customer service experience.

4. Track and measure your performance

It’s important for every social media marketing strategy to have clear goals with benchmarks to help you track and measure your performance. By analyzing key social media metrics, you’ll know whether your efforts are effective or not, and then you can make changes to your campaign accordingly.

Each social media platform has built-in analytics and insight tools for business profiles, which you can use for free.  Google Analytics can also report almost anything about your website, including referral traffic from social media. At a minimum, you should measure the following basic social media metrics:

• Reach – the number of people who have seen your post.
• Engagement – the number of unique people who’ve liked, commented, clicked, or shared your post.
• Impression – the number of times a post from your page is displayed, regardless of whether the post was clicked or not.
• Net followers –  the number of new followers minus the number of unfollows.
• Actions on page – the number of clicks on your page’s contact information and call-to-action button.

Social media marketing is a long-term commitment that every business should not take lightly.  The benefits of using social media for your business are so intensive that anyone not implementing it is missing out on myriads of business opportunities.

If you want to know more about social media marketing, or if you’re interested in working with an agency that specializes on digital marketing including social media, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Ilfusion. Give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email [email protected].

Categorized in: Marketing, SEO, Social Media