Social media can be a great way to grow your business, especially if you know what you’re doing. With these five social media best practices, you can make sure you’re spending your time on the right tasks to generate the biggest return on your financial and time investments.
Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are the best traffic driving sources for many businesses.
All you need is the right kind of tools and the consistency to make it big on social media platforms.
The best practices we have listed below are going to be very handy as you start with your social media marketing process.
01. Know Your Audience
The most important thing you can do to set your brand up for success on social media is to know your audience. Without knowing who they are, you won’t be able to reach or appeal to them.
Think about where they live, what kinds of purchases they typically make, and even how much money they earn. Then start to find out which social media platforms they spend their time on, as that will tell you where your brand should be.
Once you know which platforms your ideal audience uses, you can begin to set goals for yourself and your accounts. These goals can include things like follower count or engagement rate, but remember that those numbers aren’t always reflective of your success. Instead, create goals like the number of sales or visits to your webpage you want to generate from social media.
Whatever your goals are, make sure they’re measurable and that you put time constraints around them. This way you’ll have key benchmarks to work toward as you plan and create your content. These goals will shape your strategies, the way you interpret your analytics, and how you show up on the platforms.
02. Use Social Media Automation Tools
Social media can be a great way to reach more people, grow your following and generally promote and market your business.
Depending on how many platforms you’re present on, though, you could need to dedicate a lot of time to social media. Being active online is far more than just posting every day or even a few times a week.
Creating a social media presence also includes growth marketing to build your following, analyzing your posts, and monitoring for any mentions of your brand online. It also involves engaging with your audience through comments and direct messages, as well as showing up frequently, like through Instagram Stories or on live video.
Rather than spending every moment, you’re at the office dedicated to social media, consider using social media automation tools. The right platforms can be incredibly helpful in outsourcing some of the tasks related to social media management.
It’s almost like hiring someone to handle each of these projects. Here are six areas you can outsource and a great tool that fits the bill.
You can also get an automated notification for any social media mentions using software like Notifier.
Instagram Growth Service
Understand that an Instagram growth service is different from a platform that sells a specific number of followers.
A growth service works on behalf of your account to engage with potential followers so they can check out your profile and decide if they want to follow you. A company selling followers is likely selling bots and fake accounts since they’re guaranteeing a certain result.
Why Grow Your Following
Growing your Instagram following is important for a number of reasons. First of all, having a significant following shows potential partners that you have an active audience. This is important for making brand deals and working with others on the platform for promotions or marketing campaigns.
When you grow your Instagram following, you’re also reaching more people with your brand. This means you’re able to show more people your marketing materials and potentially convert them to customers. After all, that’s what the goal of all marketing is, right?
Finally, growing your Instagram following gives you the chance to engage with your audience and learn more about them. This can help you create better marketing campaigns and products that your audience really wants.
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Growth Services
Engagement marketing and growing your following is important and also time consuming. Using a growth service like Kicksta will solve these problems and grow a targeted audience for you.
Kicksta engages with potential followers on behalf of their customers, and they let your new followers decide to follow you. This means they’re more likely to actually engage with your content.
Social Scheduling Tool
Creating content on a daily basis and remembering to post it can be difficult. Some days you might find yourself scrambling to publish a post because you don’t have any new images to share. Other times you might realize at the end of the day that you haven’t posted anything at all.
Posting consistently is an important part of being successful on social media. Your followers and the algorithms learn when you’re likely to post, and they look forward to seeing your content. That said, we don’t want you to be stressed out each day about what to post on social media.
Instead, consider looking into a social scheduling tool like Hootsuite. With Hootsuite, you can create your posts well in advance and schedule them to be published automatically.
Plan a time to collect all the images you’ll need and write out plenty of captions for your posts. Then, schedule them so you won’t have to think about them each day.
Analytics Tool
As you’re publishing content consistently, you’ll want to make sure you’re sharing the right things with your audience. You’re dedicating your time and energy to creating content, and you don’t want it to fall flat. The best way to do this is by monitoring your analytics.
Social Report is an analytics tool that will collect all of your analytics across platforms in one place. You can view your reports on a daily or weekly basis, so you’re always informed about your accounts. Use the analytics that Social Report provides to optimize your content and create what your audience wants to see.
Identify trends in your data, like which kinds of content are most popular with your audience. For some brands it’s infographic posts, others generate more engagement on video posts. It will be different for every brand, so the best thing is to test and see what works for you.
Content Automation Tool
Even with tools to automatically publish your content, you still have to create it in the first place. Sometimes this is an easy task and other times it can feel very overwhelming. This is especially true if you’re creating content for a variety of platforms or if you post every single day. You’ll likely feel like you eventually run out of things to write.
Make this process a little easier with an automation tool like Buzzsumo. Find inspiration for new content or even partner with influencers on the Buzzsumo platform. They’ll help you create high-quality content that your followers will be excited to engage with on social media.
This is important because having a big following doesn’t mean much if your followers aren’t engaging with your posts.
Another great option is Serpstat’s content marketing ideation tools. You can see how well your content is performing on Facebook and compare that to your competitors’. This way you’ll always know how to improve and stay ahead of the curve.
Social Management Tool
When you’re pouring time and energy into creating social media posts, you don’t want to forget anything. Between your various platforms and the different types of content you can create for each page, there’s a lot to keep organized.
That’s where a social management tool like Sendible can come into play. Now, you can use Sendible to plan and schedule your posts, but you can also use it to generate reports and preview your content before it’s published.
Another great feature is social engagement. Within the Sendible platform, you can respond to your direct messages, mentions and comments. If you’re on Twitter, you can engage in conversations from within Sendible. By having all of these functions in one place, you’re sure to stay organized.
Social Listening Tool
Another social media best practice is to stay aware of who’s talking about your brand online. From customers singing your praises to trolls creating spam posts using your brand name, you need to know what’s happening.
This allows you to respond to good comments and address negative ones as soon as possible.
Spending all day listening and watching on social media can be draining, and it can feel like a waste of time if you don’t find anything helpful. That’s why a tool like Awario can make a big difference. They crawl 13 billion web pages each day and will let you know if your brand is mentioned anywhere.
03. Optimize Content For Each Platform
If you’re creating content for multiple social media platforms, read carefully. This might be the most important social media best practice for you to pick up today.
Tweak Your Content For Each Platform
Creating one post and scheduling it to publish to three different platforms at the same time is setting your brand up for disappointment. There’s a few reasons this is the case.
First of all, each platform has its own requirements and preferences. From the size of the images to hashtag rules to character count, it’s best to give each platform the respect it deserves.
Secondly, even if you optimize the content for each platform, if you post the same general post at the same time, your audience is likely to see it multiple places. People like to platform hop.
They’ll get bored of Instagram and jump over to Facebook and then to TikTok. If they see the same post, they’re less likely to engage.
When you’re tweaking your content, there are a few things you should ensure you change. Captions are important, as some platforms lend themselves to longer captions while others prefer shorter.
Then you’ll want to look for any platform-specific lingo. For example, “double tap” is a great way to ask Instagram followers to like your post, but it doesn’t make sense on Facebook
Make sure your images are optimized for each platform, and see if your optimal posting times differ based on platform. Your username and bio on your social media platforms are likely to be different, too. TikTok is young and fun, while LinkedIn is more professional, and your profile can reflect this.
04. Keep Your Eye On The Competition
Chances are that your competitors are also active on the same social media platforms you’re using. After all, if that’s where your ideal audience is, that’s where brands like yours should be. Don’t see this as a threat. Instead, see what you can learn from them.
Monitor your competitors to see what’s working for them. If they’re sharing nothing but infographics, try mixing a few infographics into your strategy. They wouldn’t keep doing it if it wasn’t working for them. Remember, just because it works for them doesn’t mean it has to work for you. But it’s a good place to start.
Also keep an eye out to see who your competitors are targeting online. Are they partnering with certain brands or influencers to get in front of a particular audience? Are they launching big influencer marketing campaigns? Whatever the case may be, stay ahead of the game so you know what’s happening.
You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) copy what your competitors are doing. However, it’s a good idea to stay informed of what they’re doing so you don’t get left behind. Try your own experiments and ideas, too!
05. Review Your Strategy
Speaking of trying experiments, make sure you’re constantly reviewing and analyzing your strategy and the tactics you’re trying. When you test something new, look at your analytics and see how your audience responded. Did you lose more followers than normal? Did you get 50% more likes than usual?
Remember that different platforms will likely have different results, so analyze each platform on its own, too. You can also try experimenting with new platforms, even if you’re not sure how active your ideal followers might be on there. You might surprise yourself.
When you’re testing out new content, use ads to run A/B tests. This means you create very similar posts that only have one thing changed. Then you can split your audience into two different groups and show each half of your audience one of the versions.
It will cost some money, but this can be a great way to get tangible insights as to what strategies resonate well with your audience.
Social Media Best Practices
When you’re looking to make an impact on your brand using social media, you don’t want to spend all of your time online.
You can make a bigger difference and generate a higher return on investment by implementing these five social media best practices to help you work smarter, use your time wisely and grow your following on social media.
