You are using your social media to promote your personal brand or your business, you are putting time and efforts into it but results are not satisfactory: your followers are not growing, engagement rate is low and referrals to your website are sluggish. In other words, your social media activity is not bringing any business benefits.
This is a common situation and may depend on many factors. Here are a few guidelines to creating a converting social media strategy.
• What are the right social media for your business?
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest…they are all different in users and communication styles. Are you going to use a lot of pictures, copy or a mix of both? Some social media perform better than others with pictures, but do not allow you to use much text. Have you got an advertising budget?
• Where can you find your audience? Which social media are your potential customers likely to use? Where are the interesting conversations about your products and services? There are many Social Media management tools which will help you find and connect with users who are talking about the things which are important to your business; we use Hootsuite or Buffer.
• Find your voice: what do you want to say? What is your style? How do you want to come across? Craft your messages accordingly. Targeted messages always prompt better responses.
• Make a plan: decide your campaigns, the messages you want to use for each of them and the type of material you will post (Pictures, quotes, infographics a mix of created and borrowed material…). After this, decide how often you are you going to post. it is more important to say useful things than to post very often but, if you want to stay on top of your readers’ mind you have to post frequently: decide your frequency according to your campaigns and messages. Identify optimal times for engagements.
• Use a content calendar, schedule your activity. A content calendar should be a guideline for future posts and an inventory; plan and schedule a lot, but always keep room for last minute posts, if the right occasion presents itself.
• Make use of event opportunities. Read this post about how to optimise event opportunities to boost your social media following, engagement and referrals.
• Use hashtags properly: hashtags are powerful tools for being found, but there are rules to using them. Don’t use too many hashtags for one post: they must complement the post, not distract from it. Make hashtags relevant to your audience and not to you: #me will attract a lot of hits but most of them will be totally irrelevant to your business. Be creative but not too much; hashtags are hyperlinks to find useful resources, so use hashtags someone might actually look for: #drivingthroughtheidyllichillsoftuscany may describe what you are doing but will hardly generate many searches, plus it’s hard work to read it.
A lot of websites will provide lists of hashtags for topics and days of the week; adapt them to your business.
• Monitor. Track follower growth, likes, shares, reactions, referral traffic, delve into insights.
Do you nedd help with your social media strategy? get in touch with Broadley Speaking for a free consultation.