I would be stunned for a good amount of time if you bring to me a brand or business being run in current times without having a social media presence. Almost every brand has made itself social in some way or form. But are all of these as active and influential as others? Well, nope. Where a great many of them possess extraordinarily exciting strong social media presence, almost a similar ratio falls into the category that is just present on social media.
Well, you can’t expect to have a thriving strong social media presence by posting a few random links and mentioning a few links and doom. You have to have a strategy that is capable of flaunting your brand in front of your audience and remind them of your presence every day and night. Yes, you are right. It isn’t just about having a profound strategy but regular posting is also a necessity to acquire a strong social media presence.
A brand does not get so much social popularity, bulk of followers, likes, comments, and shares by posting some random stuff and that too at occasional times. But they spent time and effort and budget to reach that level.
Though you don’t have a big fat budget to outshine your Twitter-like that of Wendy’s but you can surely learn some real tops from their strong social media presence.
To help you understand the key tips for building a strong social media presence, I’ve put together this comprehensive blog post outlining every significant thing.
Dive in to burst your curiosity!
Determine SMART Goals
Pop up question.
What do you aim to have a strong social media presence in the first place?
In case your answer is because every other brand does social media marketing then you surely are in trouble.
However, this trouble can be solved by determining your SMART goals. Just like you determined the goals before launching your brand, you must determine your SMART goals before launching your social media presence.
Now, what’s a SMART goal?
We all have been learning this for all our lives.
S is for Smart.
M is for Measurable.
A is for Attainable.
R is for Rational.
T is for Time-Bound.
Following the said structure for determining your goals can surely help you post things strategically on your social media platforms instead of sharing out some random links.
Discover Your Audience
Now that you know all your SMART goals, it’s time to discover the audience. We all know that a great part of the world population exists on social media. But wait, not all of them are your audience for sure.
It isn’t really difficult to gauge and define your social media audience if your brand’s audience is already defined. You just have to input that buyer persona on your social media platform and boom.
However, determining the few key aspects of compliance with the audience can help you significantly in the process of crafting a strong social media presence. These key aspects include –
- What social media platforms are most common among your audience?
- At what times your audience is most likely to be active on social media?
- What type of content is most likely to attract and engage your audience?
- What is the core problem of your audience that your brand addresses?
A lot of brands seem to face difficulty in attaining a strong social media presence despite putting in a great effort, time, and budget. Well, the root cause is their negligence towards the above-mentioned aspects. You see. A local retail clothing brand cannot attract and engage customers no matter how amazing social media presence they maintain on LinkedIn.
Try Being Human
After all the traditional years of robot selling, social media is finally humanizing the domain. Launching your social media platforms in a faceless manner without any background information or interaction with your audience is the fierce mistake one can make in times like these. This era calls for cheering your clients as your homies and friends. You talk. You Crack Jokes. You Sing. You Celebrate. You Cry. And everything else with them.
Practically speaking, you can communicate with your customers over comments as well as via inbox. Also, you can share the simple human moments of work with them like a group photo of your team celebrating a successful day or a photo where you are giving farewell to the most loved team member with sad faces.
This can build an immensely strong connection between your brand and the customers. Therefore, promising a strong social media presence for your brand.
Create A Community, Not Just Following
Attaining a huge following on your social media platforms is easier than gaining a few followers that are loyal to your brand and gets involved with your posts and everything. Keeping in mind the social of social media, we all should make sure to create a community instead of just a massive fan following. We should socialize with our followers more than often and stay connected to them via comments, likes, and shares.
In case you don’t know how to better connect with your followers and create a community, follow the tips given below and bloom with a strong social media presence like never before.
- Mentioning the accounts, you’re referring to in your posts, is a quick means of gaining their as well as their followers’ attention.
- Proactively replying to the comments on your posts is a great gesture and helps you connect better with the followers.
- Replying to those who’ve mentioned you in their posts and comments is also a great means of getting yourself noticed among yours and their followers.
- Commenting on random posts that you like and taking part in general discussions regarding a trend or something is also very helpful in building communities.
Always Create an Editorial Content Calendar
To tell you the truth, it isn’t being rigid or stiff to create and follow an editorial content calendar for your social media platforms. If you take away one common and great lesson from all the big brands with strong social media presence, it’s that they post regular and structured stuff on their social platforms.
There are chances that you are tackling multiple different social platforms for your brand at a time and struggling to get your content organized. Well, maintaining through a content calendar can be of great help for getting yourself organized through all the channels.
A good editorial calendar usually comprises of various columns and rows where you can align all your content for each social platform, arrange them according to the publishing dates and times, keep a sketch in front so that none of the content gets repeated, as well as to republish the content that’s performing amazing and can be revamped for further big results.
Automation Is Great, But Personalization Matters
Though automation is great and is getting all the hype in marketing right now. However, you cannot just leave all your social media presence over to automation and sit back for the results.
Talk about mass auto replying, they’ve been long outdated and are considered as a real negative factor for marketing. They showcase a brand as less loyal and sincere. Instead of them, both the customers and brands now prefer personalized replying as they have a sense of attachment and loyalty within them.
To adopt this new, you simply have to customize your automated messages and emails so that each of your followers feels connected to your brand in the same way.
Help Instead of Selling
Even though social media is becoming a great channel for sales, brands shouldn’t really focus on hard selling over their social channels.
Yes, that’s important to post offers and deals on the social platforms to push your sales. What’s more important here is to help your audience and answer their questions via replies and content marketing.
How to do that?
If a follower asks you something random, just give them a quick reply. And if there’s something that a lot of your followers seem to be buzzing around then creating content that comprehensively answers the query is a great means of engaging with your audience.
Visualize Aesthetically
Aesthetic visuals have always been a source of grabbing attention. There’s an artist hidden inside every human being and they get touched with a visual that’s aesthetic and has value to offer. So, always go for posting and sharing good visuals to build a strong social media presence in the long run.
Stay Active and Cross-Promote
Well, you cannot simply attain a massive following by being solicited to yourself. Whatever the great number of posts you make every day, you cannot get them noticed and appreciated unless they reach your potential audience. And to attain a good reach organically, you can use the tactic of cross-promotion. For instance, you have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can promote each of them with the audience of the other two platforms to maximize your reach over each of them.
Stay Trendy by Posting Trends
As mentioned before, building a strong social media presence doesn’t involve hard selling at all. It’s just about finding the soft corners in between headlines, breaking news, and trending hashtags where your brand can be steadily incorporated.
Learning the right use of trending hashtags for creating better and brighter posts for your social media accounts is a great success. It can help you trend along with the trend and attract a massive audience towards your brand.
Spend Where Necessary
While it’s a great thing to build a strong social media presence organically, spending where necessary shouldn’t be avoided. Unlike traditional advertisement channels, social advertising is incredibly cost-effective and doesn’t cost you even a buck for all the great outcomes they bring. It’s just that you have to have patience and wait for the results to appear.
However, paid ads aren’t the only thing. You can also promote your social accounts using PR and influencer marketing tactics. No doubt, you have to spend some money but that’s nothing in front of the insane ROI that comes along. You just have to bear with the process and boom.
Create Content That Your Customers Would Love to Engage With
Last but not the least, you cannot build a strong social media presence by posting everything that others are posting. But you need to design your content in compliance with what your audience wants to see and is interested in. Be it a picture from inside your workplace, the blogs you’ve shared on the website, or the research outcomes your team has come up with, everything you post shall be original and related to your audience in every possible way.
To put it all condensed, building a strong social media presence has become the utmost need of time for every budding brand. However, not all the brands can manage to build one on a personal basis and might need some professional help. So, hiring a digital marketing agency is always a good option for such brands.
