Guide To Growing Your Businesses Social Media: 6 Simple Steps
Guide To Growing Your Businesses Social Media: 6 Simple StepsSocial media has become a necessity for businesses around the world. Whether or not you sell products online, it is vital that your business has a strong online presence.
Social media has become one of the most effective marketing tactics in history. It is a way for businesses to develop relationships with their customers, improve brand awareness, generate more leads, and is a cost-efficient way of keeping your business in front of the eyes of your customers.
In this post, we will discuss 6 simple but effective steps to grow your business’s social media. If you follow and stay consistent with these steps you will get more followers, increase your engagement rate, build better brand loyalty, and generate more sales for your business.
Let’s get started.
Step #1: Do A Social Media Audit
Before you can create a plan for improving your social media you have to understand what you’ve been doing in the past. If your business is not on social media yet, don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place to learn how to get started.
When doing a social media audit we want to look at:
What social media platforms your businesses is currently on
How often you post on each platform
What type of content are you posting
How many followers your business accounts have
What your engagement rate is
Compare your social media to your top 3 competitors
A social media audit gives you a lot of insight into where your social media is currently at, why it's there, and provides you with the information needed to set goals for the future.
There are many types of social media templates online that can help with creating your audit, or you can click here and receive a free social media audit from me (Shameless plug).
Let’s continue.
Step #2: Know Your Audience
In order to know what platforms to be on, what you should be posting, and how you should be engaging with your followers, you first have to know who they are.
One great tactic to figure this out is to create a customer profile(s). If you haven’t already created a customer profile(s), I highly recommend you do. Whether it’s to help you grow your social media, build your email marketing funnel, or just designing the layout of your store, customer profiles can help your business every step of the way.
Now you may be asking yourself, what exactly is a customer profile. That is a fantastic question. A customer profile is basically a description of a customer or customer segment that is ideal for your business. When creating a customer profile you want to focus on their demographic, geographic and psychographic information.
Some key information to include is:
Age
Gender
Interests
Pain points
Location
Educational level
Income
To get more information on customer profiles, Hubspot has created a more in-depth explanation, as well as templates.
Step #3: Create a social media plan
So you’ve done your social media audit, you know who your customers are, now what?
It is time to create your social media plan. Creating a set plan for social media is so important to the growth of your accounts. Most businesses create plans for all the other parts of their businesses but forget about doing it for social media.
Your customer profile(s) should be used to help you create your social media plan.
When creating a plan for social media you want to include:
Your goals
Key success metrics
What social media platforms you will be on
What you can do to optimize your accounts
How often you will post
What type of content you will post
How you will create that content
Who will be in charge of running your accounts
Creating your social media plan is not something that should be rushed. Your plan will have a huge effect on whether or not you will be successful at growing your social media, so take your time when creating it.
Step #4: Create Content That People Actually Want To See
The majority of businesses that are on social media post random content, just so they have something to post. This is not the approach you should be taking, every post should have a reason behind it, it should provide value to your followers, entertain them or help build your relationship with them.
Some things to keep in mind when creating a social media post:
Quality over quantity
Focus on helping not selling
Use your customer profile
What are their interests
What problems do they have and how can you create posts that help them with those problems
What posts have gotten the most engagement in the past
What type of posts are your competitors posting
People respond well to visual content
What is trending right now
When creating content for your social media accounts the main questions you should be asking yourself are:
Will this post strengthen my relationship with my followers?
Am I providing value in this post?
Does this post align with my follower’s interests?
If the answer is no to all of these questions, then you probably shouldn’t post it.
Step #5: Build Relationships With Your Followers
The main purpose of your social media accounts should be to enhance the relationship your business has with its followers/ build trust. Creating posts is not the only way you can do this.
Some things that you should make sure you’re doing are:
Responding to every comment (within 24 hours)
Comment on every post that has used your @ or # or location
Share user generated content
Show appreciation for customers
Answer all customer problems quickly and effectively
Maintaining a good relationship with your followers can be a lot of work, but the payoff is huge, businesses that engage with their followers see a higher rate of repeat customers and a higher referral rate.
You should be treating every one of your followers the same way you would if you were engaging with them in person.
Step #6: Stay Consistent
Last but definitely not least, STAY CONSISTENT! This is very important, and I can’t stress this enough. A lot of businesses put effort into their social media for the first couple of weeks and don’t see many results, so they throw their social media plan out the window. I’m not going to sugar coat this for you, you will not see results right away, social media takes time, but the reward is so sweet.
Once you have created your social media plan, sick to it and it will pay off, I promise you.
Summary
Overall, businesses should be treating their social media with the same importance as they would treat any other part of their business.
When you figure out who your audience is, create a plan tailored to that audience, create content that audience wants to see, focus on the relationship you have with that audience, and stay consistent with what you are doing, you will grow your social media and business bigger than you ever thought possible.
“Social media is about the people! Not about your business. Provide for the people and the people will provide for you.”
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