The age in which one’s social media absence was tolerated is long gone and nowadays, it’s uncommon even for the individuals, let alone brands not to have an account on a major platform. A layman may mistake “having an account” for a social media presence, yet, it takes much more than that. Social media activity, image, visuals and consistency are just as important. For instance, as a brand, you may be primarily Twitter oriented, and while you may have a channel on YouTube, the majority of your audience may be oblivious of this fact. All in all, there are several ways to construct a better social media presence for your business and make it count.
1. Identifying platforms that matter
Before we even start talking about your social media presence, it goes without saying that you can’t be equally as active on all platforms. Even some of the world’s busiest influencers (people who hang out on social media in order to make a living) aren’t equally as active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. These are the big four, yet, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit are just as important. Needless to say, just how important they mostly depend on your industry and your audience.
2. Consistency
The first thing you need to understand is the fact that your audience has a relatively short memory span, which is why it needs to be reminded that you’re still there. To achieve this, you need to constantly upload new content, reupload your old content, as well as promote/share and talk about the content of others. Most importantly, you need to understand the fact that there are other brands on social media that represent the part of the same community.
By commenting on their content and having your comments liked and upvoted, you can engage your audience with the use of UGC (user-generated content). This is usually not the way in which brands utilize UGC, yet, this kind of ingenuity and outside-of-the-box thinking can make all the difference in the world.
3. Listen to the feedback
The biggest problem with listening to feedback lies in the fact that it’s a complex concept that sounds incredibly simple. Sure, mean comments and not enough likes and shares may be clear indicators that your content or brand isn’t well accepted. Nonetheless, this doesn’t really give you an answer why. This is why you need to engage in the subtle art of social media analytics and start assuming a more scientific method to determine your brand’s social media effectiveness. Other than this, you need to find real metrics (likes, comments and shares are mostly vanity metrics) in order to see how your brand is doing. Bounce rate, engagement rate and sales are much more important, so try interpreting them instead.
4. Invest in efficiency
As we’ve already said, you can’t hang around each of your social media platforms 24/7. Instead, you need to do two things in order to remain effective. First, you need to get someone in charge of your social media. Now, this task gets unjustly underestimated by a lot of small businesses, which prefer to put an intern in charge of this pivotal business aspect. The problem here is that these businesses usually don’t know how to recognize the scenario where they’re underrepresented on social media, which means that this problem could carry on indefinitely. Instead, you need a trained and seasoned expert in this position. Aside from this, you also need to engage in as much social media automation as you possibly can. This will help you get to that next level of efficiency of your social media presence.
5. Be human
The last thing you need to understand is the fact that people are often skeptical about whether they’re talking to a real person or a chatbot. You see, chatbots have become so sophisticated that it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference and since we’ve already talked about the necessity of automation, you’ll have to work twice as hard to convince your audience that you’re a real person. Probably the simplest way to prove this is to make an error, yet, people online are often cruel and unforgiving about such things. Therefore, figuring out the latest trends (even memes) and using them in your posts can help out establish this image.
Conclusion
Building a better social media presence is not a simple matter, yet, with enough careful planning and some deep understanding of the subject matter, it shouldn’t be difficult either. What you need to do is offer your audience something of value, yet, to do so, you must first understand what it is that they need and expect. Here, we hope the above-listed five tips may be of immense help.
