As a digital marketing company, we know a thing or two about social media marketing. We have put together a few helpful tips to improve your social media marketing today! These are steps that you should take before creating content and posting it to social media.
Step One: Identify your audience
Identification entails more than just looking at your projected client base; you need to think about what types of applications the audience is on. The medium in which you’re posting the content should match your audience. If your company product is swimwear, an Instagram account will benefit your company a lot more than a LinkedIn account. The best time to post needs to be researched within the social media platform and determined to gain the most engagement on your content. Finally, the content itself needs to be reviewed. We recommend selecting your brand voice before working on social media to keep your brand consistent.
Step Two: Be personable
The best way to gain followers and encourage engagement is through building relationships with your followers. Have a conversation with them. You can do this by ending your post with a question to strike up a conversation or hosting a live stream to interact in real-time with your audience. By driving conversations on Instagram, you can better relate to the followers and have discussions with users. One unique feature for Instagram and Twitter is using polls to interact with followers. Using the poll feature, users can have a say in various matters for the company; a clothing brand can determine what kind of shirt or fabric their customers prefer through a simple poll.
Step Three: Be active
We recommend posting fresh new content a few times a week to keep your company at the forefront of your customers’ minds. Posting often can be challenging, but using a scheduling tool will assist with that. Each one allows you to schedule your postings to be automatically sent to the application and posted on your company’s feed. There are different types of great scheduling applications like HootSuite, Loomly, Later, and many others. Each has its advantages and fulfills different needs, so finding the one that is the perfect fit for your business may take some trial and error!
A great way to maintain posting frequency is to create and use a content calendar. This tool will allow you to stay current and consistent with everyone on your social team. Posting often doesn’t mean just posting on the main feed. It can be a variety of different types of posts. Some examples include main feed pictures or videos, a carousel of images or videos, Reels (Instagram), stories, etc.
Step Four: Utilize hashtags
The best way to utilize hashtags depends on the platform. For LinkedIn, using hashtags can build conversations and can help users find your account. On Instagram, using hashtags can increase interaction and make it easy to search your posting topic. Each platform uses hashtags in slightly different ways to make them more useful to users. Hashtags are trial and error. You need to find what works for you and what doesn’t. The hashtags need to be relatable to not only the post but your company as well.
By staying up to date on hashtags, you can find trends that work with your company. Not sure where to start? Check out the competition. See what types of hashtags they use and how relatable the tags are to your industry. Stay up to date on trends and use the trending hashtags, as they are a great way of connecting with your audience or gaining new followers.
Step Five: Monitor your analytics
If your business would benefit from Instagram as the medium, the Insights are within the app. You can see the best days and times to post based on your current followers. Breaking it down even further, Insights per post can show all interactions from users, including:
Impressions: whether they come from home, profile, hashtag, or other
Reach: the number of followers from the post, profile visits, and website clicks
These are the first few steps to follow for improving your company’s social media presence, but it doesn’t end here. If you need help, we encourage you to reach out! The Fable Heart Media team would love to give feedback or help you and your company in any way possible for social media management!
