Everyone is online. According to Google, people will spend over 5 hours of their lives using social media. This is 40 minutes on Facebook, 35 minutes on YouTube and 15 minutes on Instagram, every day on average. You as a business owner just can’t afford not being there! We did some digging on our own and we ranked 5 strategies that are really effective if you want to grow your business on social media.
1. Optimize your content
Let’s get started. The first strategy is to optimize your content. You have probably seen other blogs and videos about that your content should be of high quality, unique, relevant and appealing for your audience. But how do I create and curate content like that? If you want to position your brand as the top leader in your industry, maybe you should take a look into what the successful brands are already doing. So I have 3 tips to help you with that. The first is the 40:60 rule. That means that you should create 40% of all the content and curate 60% of all your postings. That helps you to focus on creating high-quality content and still maintain the consistency. The second is Shareability. Better than original high quality and relevant, you should focus on shareable content. If you want to know what is shareability, just go to your competitor’s timeline and write down what kind of content receives the most number of likes, comments, and shares. Go back to your workstation and start creating and curating content with those same elements. In general, you will notice that posting partial information, Humble-brag comments, out-of-context posts, and personal-biased content usually are not shareable. On the other hand How-to posts, positive entertaining content, trending topics in the industry fresh updates and social-causes reported by your business have a higher rate of shareability and help you increase your credibility. Now that you got good content in your hands, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could find if that content will hit or crash? Using tools like Feedly should help you to find and organize RSS feeds that are relevant to your business. Once you find the topics, using Buzzsumo will show the total engagement achieved by any post. You can also check what the total engagement of the content that you are creating. And then, to automate the delivering, you can use a tool like Statusbrew.
2. Be present on the social media
The second strategy is to be present on social media. This is the easiest way to talk directly to your customers and you can do that without spending any money. Apart from liking, commenting, sharing and answering content relevant to your brand, you should focus on listening, monitoring and engaging. The challenge here is to optimize the time you’ll spend on this activity. Good news is that you don’t need to monitor all the social media channel all the time. And that’s great because there are thousands of social media channels out there. A good way to start deciding where to be present is to look where your competitors are. If they are posting like crazy on Instagram, maybe it’s a good idea to start paying attention to that platform too. Another way to reach a relevant audience is to be an industry-specific social media like … for marketers, …. for designers and ….. for students. And after defining where to be present, it’s time to decide what kind of content you would like to engage with. Remember to engage where you can add value to and try not hijacking the conversations, which takes us to the next point. Define your style and principles, and stick to them. If you are funny while engaging, don’t turn to a scientific speech overnight. And if you post pictures three times a day, don’t spend three weeks without posting anything. Consistency is the key here. Guidelines set, time to get into practice. You can use tools like Hootsuite listening to track conversations, that enable you to engage without having to scroll down and visit different pages where your brand is present.
3. Tackle influential marketing
The third strategy is to tackle influential marketing. This is something that will dominate the market in the coming years and is the cheapest way to gain scale and even go viral if you do it in the right way. Influential Marketing is to use influencers to market your brand and you probably already know some big influencers like Gary Vee and Nathan Allen, but there are also niche influencers like Sam Hurley and Mary Smith. These guys are known for publishing great content, having a huge audience and always adding value while they engage. Now consider the benefit of getting those guys to advocate for your brand. If they share your content, it will automatically leverage your visibility to all the audience that is listening to them. And because their engagement is high, your content will probably be shared by loads of people. But now, how can you make them listen to you? The first thing is to identify the real influencers. See, only because one Twitter profile has followers that don’t mean that he is an influencer. The engagement is a really better metric to define influence. Now once you identify the right people, you can try to talking directly to them, presenting yourself, presenting your brand. Be honest about your intentions. It is also a good idea to do your homework. Search their background and tell them why it makes sense for them to interact with you and with your brand. And also prepare to pay them for collaboration, which takes us to the fourth strategy.
4. Prepare to spend money on social media market
The fourth strategy is to prepare to spend money on the social media market. ‘There is no free lunch,’ yeah, it also applies here. Fact is that organic growth is dying. Platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter have recently updated their apps to prize even more paid content and even less the non-paid content. That means that it’s harder to gain space in your customer’s timeline. Now, you and I agree that it doesn’t make sense, first spending a lot of effort on producing content, if nobody is going to see it! However, understand that before paying you should prepare, otherwise you’ll be just wasting money. And just to make sure you don’t miss the point, your competitors are already doing it. Now, how much should you spend? 20% of your marketing budget should be a good way to start. Also, remember that, make sense for you to go to a paid campaign because platforms like Facebook knows much more about your customers than you can imagine. They do a great job while targeting. But, once started, control your anxiety because it will take a while for the results to come.
5. Deliver value offline
And the fifth strategy is to deliver value offline. No, your online strategy is not restricted to the online world. Actually interacting offline with your customers is the best way to keep them for life. It is even better if you can mix the offline with the online experience. See what Price Waterhouse Coopers did, the auditing company that is taking care of the Oscar briefcase for the past 82 years. They have sent an actual briefcase to celebrities before the 2016 Oscar ceremony! The celebrities went crazy and posted tons of pictures in their social media profiles, boosting the brand awareness to the sky. You can do something similar by sending a special gift to your customers. The most important is to make sure that this is part of the customer’s experience. So they can remember you forever. I hope you find this useful and if there’s anything I missed, let me know in the comments.
