Social media is one of the most powerful tools you can use to drive your business goals.
It's not just a place to post pictures of your latest outfit or make jokes about how unimpressed your dog is with it—it's a platform for reaching out to potential customers, engaging with existing customers, and building brand awareness.
But if you're not using social media correctly, it can be downright harmful to your business goals. Below are three key tips for making social media work for your business!
Decide who you want to reach and what you want them to do.
It doesn’t matter if you run a small business or a big company. Social media is a critical component of a marketing strategy. It helps you connect with your target audience, boost your leads and sales, and discover your brand awareness. The most important thing to focus on if you want to increase awareness, leads, and sales is to start creating a solid marketing strategy that clearly targets your potential customers.
Identify your target audience, and create content that speaks directly to them. If they don't see themselves reflected in what you're posting, they won't engage with it! Create content that speaks directly to your target audience
Set goals and metrics for each social media platform you use.
If you aren’t tracking your goals, then how will you know if they’re being met? Back in the day, before the neverending algorithm changes, likes and follows were the indicator of a successful social media account. Today, it’s simply not enough to rely on likes and follows, especially for business accounts. Likes and follow don’t drive true awareness, and it definitely doesn’t drive leads and sales. Here are three (well, four) metrics to track instead:
Reach and Impressions to maximize your visibility and awareness. Reach tells you the number of people who viewed your content while impressions tell you how many times your content was viewed (people can view your content more than once). Tracking reach helps you understand if you increase the number of people your content is getting in front of — you want to reach as much of your target audience as possible. Impressions are important as well because you need multiple touchpoints in order for people to recognize and be aware of you and your business.
Engagement to indicate interest in your content and your business. If people are going beyond a like and commenting, sending you a DM, asking questions or sharing your content, that’s an excellent sign that you’ve caught their attention enough for them to stop and actively engage. You should be posting content that delivers information that encourages someone to engage, but you should also tell them to engage.
Follower Insights for brand alignment. As we discussed in the previous point, you want to be clear on your target audience. For example, my target audience is female entrepreneurs, so if my followers are 80% men, there’s something about my content that is appealing to men and NOT appealing to women and that’s an opportunity for me to adjust my content. You also want to understand audience behaviors so you can…
Make adjustments based on what works best for your audience.
Social media insights will help you uncover a lot about your audience, not just demographics. You can learn what type of content is most engaging for them, what time and day they’re active on each social platform and some insights tell you more about their interests. Whatever data is provided with the tools that you’re using, use it to make adjustments to your social media strategy. For example, there’s no point in you posting five static images if your audience is more engaged with carousels or reels. Maybe they enjoy “A Day in the Life of a Business Owner” content to get a behind-the-scenes look at your business – post more of it! Just always make sure you’re optimizing your content for your audience's needs and your business goals.
Finally
When used properly, social media can have a profound impact on business and have the power to show your business in the best light possible. It's an endless stream of information that speaks directly to your target audience--the people who will buy from you. How you choose to participate in social media can be the difference between success and failure. Get it right, though, and you'll deliver pertinent information that's valuable to your customers, while also promoting your brand.
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