6 ways to make the most of your social media
Do you know how to make the most of your social media?
Social Media – we all know we should be on it but how do you stand out from the crowd?
Here are six ways to help you connect and engage with your ideal customers and build a social media following that delivers more than just likes.
1. Strategy, strategy, strategy
2. Know your customers
3. Play where your ideal customer plays
4. Choose your platform/s
5. Create your content
6. Measure, measure, measure
1. Strategy, strategy, strategy
Social media is so much more than gaining likes!
It’s really important to know what you want to achieve with your social media marketing campaign.
This means building a social media marketing strategy. It’s not too scary. It’s really just thinking about your objectives or goals. Do you want to:
- build brand awareness
- share content and position yourself as the expert, the go-to solution
- create leads that generate inquiries for your services
- sell your products
- create a community
- achieve something else
Set clear goals that you can measure so you know you’re whether you’re kicking your social media goals.
Know your customers
There's no point being on social media and just pumping out content that isn't going to reach, connect, and engage your ideal customer. AND to create appropriate content you need to know who your ideal customer is.
This is where you can create, what we marketers call, customer personas.
A customer persona describes your ideal customer’s demographics and psychographics.
Creating your customer persona will help you have a detailed understanding of your ideal customer.
This, in turn, means you can create your content to meet their expectations and preferences.
And that means they are more likely to connect and engage with your business and you have a higher chance of building a loyal customer base.
Play where your ideal customer plays
So how do you find out where your ideal customers are playing?
To find out where your ideal clients are on social media, try:
- Looking at where your competitors are active on social media.
- Doing a search on the hashtags your ideal customer would potentially be following.
These are just a couple of examples of how to find out where your ideal customers are. Check out my blog on Playing Where Your Ideal Customer Is Playing for more ways to do some research.
Choose your plaforms
While you can play on all the social media platforms, you actually don't need to be active on all of them.
Everyone is time poor (even those with amazing time management skills). This alone is one reason why playing where your audience plays is important. You aren’t wasting time creating content for people who are not going to engage with it.
Another and probably more important reason is that you want to get the best return on your investment from your social media marketing strategy.
If you'll get more results from Facebook and Instagram than from LinkedIn and Twitter then you should focus your campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.
And really, if you have done your research you should be confident about choosing the right platform – or platforms.
Create your content
So you have a social media strategy, you know who your ideal customers are, where they play and which platforms you are going to focus on.
Now what?
Now you need to plan and create your content. The easiest way to plan your content is to use a social media calendar.
This can be as simple as using a calendar spreadsheet and populating your planned post – topic, theme, platform etc.
When planning your content, think about:
- the different types of posts you will share each week
- will you vary your posts for different platforms
- what time of day/night will you schedule your posts
- how often will you post
- how all your posts will flow
And ALWAYS ask yourself – how does this post align to my social media marketing strategy?
Creating your content can be more challenging. You need to make sure your tone, imagery etc aligns to your brand position. It can be time-consuming.
If you are not comfortable creating your own content, (shameless self-plug) get in touch – I'd love to help you.
Think about the time it takes you to create content. Would you be better spending your time on the core aspect of your business – perhaps you might be better off outsourcing your social media content creation.
Measure, measure, measure
The great thing about social media is that you can easily measure your results. Most of them have built-in analytics, so you have instant access to how your social media is performing.
In its simplest format, you can see whether the number of followers of your page is increasing and at what rate. You can measure the level of engagement of your audience – are they really interested in what you are sharing. You can measure referrals, click-throughs and shares. You can see where your engaged audience is located and at what time they are most active. The list goes on.
There are so many metrics available, the important thing is to focus on the measurements that align with your marketing strategy goals.
Become a savvy social media player
Check out our Savvy Social Media Planning program – a DIY online program where you learn the above AND MORE!!!
Enrol today and get rid of the social media overwhelm so you can take your social media from meh to marvellous. It’s only $197 for lifetime access. Yep, you can revisit the program as often as you like – no limitations.
One-on-one training with me to become a savvy social media player is valued at over $1000!
That makes $197 for lifetime access is a bargain.
Find out more about the Savvy Social Media Planning program here.
Or enrol here.
