Contents Overview
You understand the power of social media for digital marketing and increasing your brand’s reach. But where do you start?
It’s become unavoidable—every brand should want to build and expand its social media presence. If you can stay on your customers’ feeds and the platforms they’re already spending most of their time on, you can stay on their minds. This will hold true whether they’re actively ‘window-shopping’ through your profile, or just casually browsing.
Social media titans are in steady supply. The choices range from LinkedIn to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Discord, and so on. Each platform has its own methods and demographics, and the rule of engagement—or how people interact. So each of them will require a different approach.
Improving your social media presence—or even creating a presence—calls for a focused and calculated approach. So we’ll look at the expert-tested tips that can take your social media presence to a whole new level.
Let’s dive in, but first, why is a social media presence so important?
Why Your Brand Should Care About Social Media Presence
Your social media presence is the expression of your brand’s personality using bite-sized representation, through media and posts of social media. It’s your outward face to the world, where your loyal customers and new visitors can find out about your page and brand.
In 2023 we find out it’s estimated that a whopping 4.89 billion social media users exist worldwide. And this presents a unique and tremendous opportunity for your brand to be seen.
Additionally, between 2021 and 2022, consumers’ preferences increased by 74% for brands that align themselves with the consumers’ values. This shows that consumers persistently want to identify themselves with brands that resonate with their individuality or personalities, again and again.
Your social media profile gives you the freedom to express your brand’s personality, making the business more likable and human.
And the main benefit is, your social media presence helps to increase awareness of your brand. So the more you work on how you sound and project on social media, the more first-time visitors and even your customer base will want to be associated with you.
Targeting is the watchword for brands. With the right techniques, you can transform your presence and even go viral. Just like how established businesses like UK-based fashion retailer ASOS were able to see a 24% rise in sales during the COVID lockdowns due to a proactive social media strategy that focused on popular lockdowns fashion trends (such as leisurewear) while leveraging micro-influencers.
Blowing up online, going viral, or simply having a popular presence don’t happen by chance—but take strategic planning. You can go viral, but without a solid foundation, it may all become a one-hit-wonder. Consistency is crucial for a presence that will stand the test of time.
8 Expert Tips to Transform Your Social Media Presence
Before taking the next step and working to evolve your social media presence—you have to cover all preliminary steps as they concern your brand and your social media profile/page.
The first thing you want to do is set your social media goals. You need specific goals, that you can measure as you go along. You also want to make sure these goals are achievable within a specific timeframe before you retest strategies—and that the targets are relevant to your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
You also want to understand audience preferences for the different social media platforms. Twitter users interact with content differently from the way Redditors react to content, and is also different from how Instagram users interact with content. So know who you’re talking to and where.
And finally complete your social media page, full of the brand’s voice, vision, and a link to your website or other platforms with your digital presence.
So to summarize this, you want to;
- Focus on SMART goals
- Know your audience by platform
- Complete your social media profile
And now for the tips to transform your brand’s presence on social media.
Develop A Posting Schedule
A content calendar for social media posts and events will help you manage your posting routine and content.
Keep track of campaigns and content themes, and get a bird’s eye view of your overall posting frequency—to ensure you’re meeting your audience at their social media peak times, when and where they are. Focus on;
- What type of content to post
- How frequent are these posts
- What time of day do you need to post
- What’s included in these post
There are calendar tools that’ll help streamline your posts. Some even offer a centralized hub for managing planning through to posting on your various social channels.
Interact With Your Audience and Chase Relationships, Not Followers
Social media platforms are built for interactions between users, friends, and strangers—exchanging information.
Some brands fail completely with their social media strategies because they refuse to use this simple trick. Interact with your audience and you will see results. If you focus on actually being approachable, communicative, and fun, brand awareness will peak and your audience will be switched on.
For example; Redbull’s Twitter account. The company tries to respond to every comment in their posts and mentions on Twitter.
By engaging their audience and performing ‘social listening’, they’re able to build relationships with their followers with great relationship-building and great content production for sports fans.
Use Automation Tactfully to Ease Manual Processes
Automation is a game changer for your posting schedule—allowing you to prepare batches of posts for different times of the day.
Global brands with a multi-location presence can even prepare posts for their audience whose activity levels will be affected by time zone differences.
Another use case is customer care with automated replies. These instant replies will improve your customer care by immediately addressing a message, a reply, or an inquiry.
Also try to automate admin tasks, so you can focus on building connections after studying the audience data collected.
Measure and Monitor Your Engagements
Constantly determine the performance of your metrics, and what platform and content are delivering the best results. Do your customers prefer video content or long explainer posts? Is your target audience tuned in and are they actually interacting with your content?
Social media platforms come with built-in analytics tools that help you see things like how many views a post is getting, how many interactions, likes, and so on. This is a good place to start with monitoring metrics—but ultimately you’ll want to use a more robust tool to measure and keep track of all targets.
Use Multimedia to Communicate With Your Audience
Eye-catching multimedia and visual content can help draw the attention of social media users casually scrolling through their timelines.
Elements like GIFS, videos, image slideshows, and voice memos, will add another dimension to your social media presence. These will, in essence, show how interesting your brand can be. In fact, 73% of content marketers considered visual content like pictures, graphics, or photos, a top priority in 2022.
Here’s Lyft‘s Youtube channel, with visuals that make you just stop and stare
Be Active and Available
Constantly updating your page with new posts and content will keep you at the fore of your audience. Make sure you stick to the content calendar and stay agile for any trends you might have to hop on quickly.
Staying active also means being available to respond to customers and new followers on time. And also utilize automated processes—since you can’t always be active at every hour. An automated reply lets users know they’re heard, and then the human reply should follow shortly after.
You can be active when engaging with your audience by;
- Replying to all comments on your content
- Sharing content users produce on your profiles
- Commenting on posts of your target audience and pages they interact with
Ride Trends to Remain Current and Fresh
You can join in on trends that are appropriate and fit into your brand image. Following trends can be immense for your brand, achieving virality, or just amusing your customers.
Duolingo does a great job of this on their Tiktok page. The brand takes on a more active approach to being in on all trends on the platform, like dancing with the Minions when their movie came out. You can do something similar too! Find quirky, fun trends your audience likes and create wholesome content that aligns with your brand identity.
Influencers are usually the best at spotting trends quickly and setting them. So following a few social media notable figures will help you keep up with the latest trends.
Focus on Being Helpful and Not Too Salesy
Even though you’re running a business, you don’t have to stay in business mode all the time on your socials. This may sound counterproductive, but if we look at it—no one wants to constantly have ad messaging following them when they’re trying to see cute cat videos.
Focusing on assisting customers with their questions and creating how-to’s will position your brand as the symbol of helpfulness and responsiveness. So if you have a clothing retail business, for instance, you could create mood boards and general styling tips for your audience. You could potentially collaborate with a popular influencer to create styling content, or just sponsor a staple clothing haul like Roxxasaurus on Shein.
And handle complaints properly and with care. A well-handled complaint can divert attention from the initial issue and turn it to how well and how helpful your ‘customer care teams’ are.
These tips should applied with a clear marketing strategy will help you grow your social media accounts exponentially, and put you in front of a lot eyes; not just customers. Never shy away from experimenting with these tips or a combination of a few. Change what might not work, and go again. Being consistent in your social media efforts—how often you post, the type and quality of content you’re putting out there, and interacting with users—is the ultimate tip for transforming your social media presence.
Conclusion
We’ve seen that improving your social media presence will help you build genuine relationships with customers as well as keep up with the competition.
We’ve also seen ways we can improve this presence at a rapid rate, with tried and tested tips—like using a posting schedule, automated processes, being helpful, being active and interacting with users when they need you, and using visuals and trends to your advantage.
Social media helps you target very niched audiences and provide valuable insights as to how your product is viewed. These can all give you a competitive edge in your overall business strategy.
So prioritize growing your social media presence today!
