Four ways to rock your social media
There’s no doubt that you know the value that social media can bring to you and your company or organization. It’s the easiest—and often cheapest—avenue for you to build a client base, garner traction for marketing, and increase your brand awareness.
However, it’s not enough to make a bunch of social media accounts and let them sit on autopilot. You simply will not see results that way. Running a successful social media campaign takes finesse, creativity, and a keen understanding of who your audience is and exactly what they want to see.
Becoming your company’s social media guru doesn’t happen overnight, but here are a few tips that will get you started on building a dynamic and powerful social media campaign.
- Find the best tools for the job
They say a poor craftsman blames his tools. When running multiple social media platforms for one business, it’d be safe to actually say that a craftsman is only as good as the tools he or she decides to utilize. Between consistent posting, audience engagement, analyzing success, and a slew of other responsibilities that come along with managing social media, you’d be crazy not to incorporate some of the amazing tools that have been developed to make your life easier.
- Trello – Trello is a project management platform that allows you to easily track the many intricacies of running a successful social media campaign. Keep up with your tasks for the day, monitor strategies that are in testing, and easily collaborate with other team members for your projects
- Later – You don’t always have the time to sit down and plan out each and every post right when you want to post them. Later for Instagram allows you to preemptively create a post and automate when it goes out.
- eClincher – eClincher is a social media platform aggregation tool that allows you to see all of your pages in one place. This makes it easy to do a single post across multiple platforms and analyze the success of your campaigns.
These are just a few options to help you get started. There is a slew of other useful tools out there, but the key is to find the ones that work for you.
2. Be useful to your audience
Sometimes it helps to not think of yourself or your organization as an entity trying to sell something. Rather, position yourself as a provider of information, or a thought leader for your audience, always able to keep them up to date with the latest news in your respective field of expertise.
- Don’t be too salesy – People are weary of being sold to. Try not to be too forward with the promotion of your brand. Instead, try to weave in a compelling narrative that seamlessly integrates into the promotion of your business or organization.
- Set a tone of urgency – Deadlines work well on people. If you give them a set time to take advantage of an offer, your audience is more likely to buy into it.
- Post a variety of content – Be dynamic with the types of media you post. Audiences like to see their content in various ways—articles, photos, videos, links—and keeping things interesting will help you become a valuable source of information or entertainment.
- Make sure the content is worth posting – Don’t make a post just for the sake of making a post. This is perhaps just as ineffective as not posting something at all. Think of yourself as an information curator—know your audience and what they like to see on their feeds.
3. Build a solid strategy
You need to have a firm game plan for each and every day. Audiences enjoy consistency, and once you nail down a solid strategy, you’ll find that more people are likely to engage with your brand.
- Do some trial and error testing – It is a rarity to see something done right the first time. You have to experiment with the various types of content you post to find out what resonates with your followers. Don’t be afraid to experiment!
- Employ the concept of “one voice” – Depending on the size of the operation, you probably can’t always be the one to make a post or an update. In this scenario, it’s crucial to keep in mind the idea of “one voice.” That is, make sure that every piece of content you put out sounds like it was written by the same person. Multiple voices on one page is sloppy, inconsistent, and can come off as disingenuous to your audience.
- Relate all content to your mission/brand – This one can be tricky because, as stated previously, you don’t want to come off as a salesperson in your social media posts. Be subtle. Try to think, “how can we get our followers excited about what we’re doing?”
- Keep doing what works – Don’t fix what isn’t broken! If you find a strategy that is awarding you followers and interaction, run with that strategy.
4. Learn from the mistakes of others
Failure is certainly a major component of success. But why fail in areas that you know you can avoid? Here are some surefire ways to ensure that your social media following never grows.
- Not being authentic – You should always try to be yourself in your posts. Don’t follow the latest trend or fad in the social media world. Create your own path and find what works for you.
- Spelling, grammar, and posting errors – This one should go without saying. If your content is riddled with poor spelling and punctuation, people are going to notice, and they aren’t going to want to come to you for information anymore. Additionally, make sure your posting process is finely tuned. There is nothing more awkward than realizing you made the same post multiple times.
- Not staying on brand – You want to provide great content for your audience in order to gain their trust. However, you also want to make sure that it coincides with the mission of your brand. If you’re not ensuring that there’s a link between your organization and what you are posting, then what is all of this for?
Admittedly, it doesn’t take a scientist to run a social media campaign, but right out of the gate it can definitely seem a little daunting. However, if you take the time to find the right tools, understand your utility to your audience, and nail down a course of action, you’ll find that social media can be one of your company’s greatest assets.