Social media is a key component of figuring out the signals your consumers are sending you in terms of what type of marketing campaigns will get the best response.
We wanted to take the opportunity to talk about social media’s role in legitimizing a business’s brand (thus improving its business reputation as a whole and hopefully increasing overall sales.
Try These 5 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
#1. Improve Your Social Media Monitoring
Monitoring and managing multiple social media accounts for a business requires focus and persistence. To improve your social monitoring, members of your team need to regularly assess brand awareness and reputation across platforms.
There are plenty of social media marketing tools out there to choose from, but when it comes to social monitoring tools, you’ll want to be extra cautious while doing your due diligence. In an overcrowded sea of content competing for attention on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, it’s easy to fall for vanity metrics and think that more likes means more revenue will follow.
Your social media marketing team needs to closely monitor the data analytics that will lead to increasing your bottom line. Monitoring brand mentions, hashtags, and related trending topics is the bare minimum, and needs to be done consistently and strategically. Social media monitoring also works hand-in-hand with social listening, which we’ll get into more detail later.
#2. Focus on Social Media Listening
There are some significant differences between social “listening” and social monitoring. One thing they both have in common is how overcrowded the market is for social monitoring and listening tools that claim to be the magic bullet in allowing companies to succeed at social media marketing.
In reality, social media listening requires a more holistic and forward thinking approach. Listening to the people who matter to your company’s bottom line and overall success (your actual current customers, and not just your projected ideal, typical customer) is key.
Social listening is about having a heightened awareness about your brand’s perception across social channel, and then acting on those insights accordingly.
Another part of social listening is understanding your competitors’ public perception, and then figuring out how you compare. Analyze what types of people appreciate not only your business but also competitors in your field (in terms of demographics, psycho graphics, location, preferred social platform, etc.)
Without completely obsessing over what the competition is doing, you can take note of what is working for them and use it to help your own brand level up.
3) Invest In Tracking the Metrics That Matter Most
The metrics that matter most to your business depend on a multitude of factors and they are always subject to change. It’s worth every minute of your time (and every penny) to be tracking the right social media metrics to get the most out of any effort.
The key is to identify the relationship between impressions, likes, comments, etc. and revenue generation. It’s easier said than done. Bringing an expert on board who can help you evaluate the current metrics you’re using to measure success and guide your decision making could be a game changer.
Consulting with someone who can help you avoids reliance on vanity metrics and narrow your focus to a handful of KPI’s can restore your faith in the effectiveness of social media. You might even decide that one particular “north star metric” to guide your actions.
#4. Interact With Your Audience
One of the only surefire ways to succeed at social media marketing in 2019 is having authentic interactions with the people who you want purchasing your product at the end of the day. Interacting with your followers in a way that fosters community is key to long term success for online businesses today.
For example, the digitally native luggage brand, away, has excelled in its niche by focusing on being a lifestyle travel brand that has a relationship with its customers. The different approach Away takes on selling luggage contributes to the reason why the brand has roughly quadruple and double the number of Instagram followers of competitors Samsonite and Tumi, respectively.
Away’s Instagram bio nicely sums up its brand approach: “Thoughtful standards for modern travel” and includes its signature hashtag, “#travelaway”.
Away has established itself not just as a company that sells suitcases, but also a travel-loving online community, and it’s largely thanks to its social media presence and interactions. The brand decided not to focus on the functionality or quality of their luggage, but rather crafts a brand story (expressed through social media and other channels) of the modern, well-traveled lifestyle of their customers.
They even created a podcast and a magazine as additional channels for their storytelling content to thrive.Ask yourself: does your audience know your unique selling proposition (USP) and if not, how can you convey it in a captivating way? Finding new ways to legitimize and boost your brand in an attention-grabbing way (without being off-brand) is key for social media success.
#5. Try New Tactics And Adapt Based On Your Success
In the realm of social media, your audience has a short attention span and content becomes stale fast. When you have a fresh take on something and your content is truly original and memorable, it stands out. Experiment with your social media strategy and then pay attention to social signals to see which types of posts and engagement tactics are the most effective.
Slightly switching up your communication style could have its perks, depending on the circumstance. Take the time to sit down with your team and nail down some of the main reasons why people enjoy your brand, products, and content.
The goal shouldn’t be to do something outrageous and go viral, but rather to aim for something more sustainable. Your other marketing efforts will feed off your social media presence (and vice versa), so it pays off to figure out how to make your marketing tactics complement each other across channels.
To Wrap it up…
At Chain link , we’re here to help you come up with the best social media engagement plan to maximize the success of every marketing campaign. Need more advice on navigating today’s social media landscape? Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help your business succeed online.
Whether you’re a large, established brand or a small start-up, we’d love to connect and tell you how our services might be a good fit for you. Also, don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter for more exclusive tips and strategies.