Social media is a powerful tool to create brand awareness and to increase your reach. For growing businesses, having a strong social media strategy is key to their success. Regardless of whether you are using Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest or YouTube, it’s crucial that you have a solid, constant approach to developing your brand online in a way that aligns to your offline strategy.
Here are 3 key things to keep in mind when developing and implementing your social media strategy:
1. Be Consistent: Social media presence can have a huge impact on your brand. However, it’s not enough to create a profile and then forget about it for a while. It’s called social media for a reason; you must be social and interact constantly, otherwise you risk losing credibility. Think about it for a minute, if you visit a Facebook page and see that the last post was made over one month ago, you’ll be wondering whether the business is still open or whether the address is correct, etc. If posting everyday seems too daunting, try to post at least a few times a week.
2. Quality over Quantity: While you may be tempted to use all social media platforms, more isn’t necessarily better. Figure out which platforms your target audience prefers to use and which ones they are the most active on; focus on developing your social media presence in these platforms. When choosing a platform, you must think about what type of content will you be creating. If your business will benefit from imagery, consider Pinterest and Instagram; if your business is more about sharing knowledge, consider Facebook or LinkedIn to create longer posts; if you’ll be creating videos think about YouTube and Facebook.
3. Customize Content for each Platform: Each social media platform uses a different “language”. Your Facebook posts shouldn’t be the same as your Twitter or Instagram posts. Even though the actual post is different, the key underlying message should be the same. Therefore, focusing on a couple of platforms is better than using all of them; it’ll make it easier for you to understand how each platform is used and how to format your content accordingly.
Here’s an extra tip, make sure you are measuring your social media efforts. Keep track of your followers and the interaction they have with your page. Make sure you establish goals–how many followers you want to have, how many shares or likes, etc.
Finally, don’t make it all about yourself. Posts about your brand, services or products should be no more than 80% of your overall activity. The remaining 20% should be posts about topics that will be of interest and value to your audience or sharing posts from other sites.
Speaking of social media, make sure you follow Greenhill Office Suites on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn!
