Social media marketing is a fantastic avenue for increasing brand awareness, communicating with customers and followers, sharing company news, and more—but if your brand has never before been seen on the likes of Twitter or Facebook, you’ve got some work to do. After all, first impressions are important, particularly when you only have a few seconds to grab attention and wow your audience.
Whether you’re preparing to leap into social for the first time, refresh your brand, or simply expand your social media marketing strategy to include a new platform, nailing your brand’s first social media appearance is vital to the long-term success of your online efforts. Here’s how to do it.
Lay the Groundwork
Posting without a plan or a clear idea of your brand’s objectives will get you nowhere. Before you announce that your brand is now on Instagram, Twitter, or another platform, take the time to cultivate a strong, authentic digital voice. Identifying and fleshing out a brand voice is the most effective starting point for any business considering building a social presence. From understanding how to communicate most clearly to your target audience and knowing what consumers most appreciate about your product or offer to recognizing which social medium or platform is best suited for your brand, your initial planning and the subsequent strength of your digital voice will determine the success of your foray into social.
Once you’ve brainstormed a unique, authentic brand voice that falls in line with the rest of your brand image, it becomes simple to develop it for various mediums further. This allows brands to tailor their content and media to be the ideal fit for the message they hope to convey. However, other factors do play into the probability of social media success, including the strength of your content and how often you choose to post.
Create Impactful Content
Whether you’re revealing a new product, sharing a business victory, or raising awareness of a new blog, what you say, and how you say it, matters. If you’ve been frustrated by previous efforts to drive engagement or conversions on social, you may be thinking that there just isn’t a way to catch your audience’s eye. But there is! The key to a successful content strategy lies in a commitment to excellence and a refusal to create (or post) lazy content. Putting effort into your content creation, rather than posting just to post, improves your chances of driving organic traffic and developing a closer relationship with your audience.
Post Regularly
Maybe your brand already creates stellar content for blogs or white papers. That’s awesome! That momentum can easily be extended to social media. Consider adapting some of that content for social—but be intentional about when and how you actually post it. Even the strongest content will yield poor results if you post inconsistently.
To reap the full benefits of social media, consider creating a content calendar to help ensure that the right posts go out to the best audience at the most opportune time. Not only can consistent posting (we’re talking two to four times per day) help to build a brand’s reputation as an expert in a given field, but it will also work to foster an engaged online following and strengthen your customer base.
Once you have crafted a distinct digital voice and are equipped to post valuable, high-level content on a regular basis, your brand is ready to crush social media.
Measure Success
Once you’ve established your presence on the social media platforms of your choice and been posting consistently, it’s crucial to measure the success of your efforts. Whether you post blogs, tweets, videos, long-form content, or even memes, measuring the resulting conversions, interactions, and views on those pieces can provide valuable insight into how you might tailor your social strategy to your audience.
Think about it this way. If you were a shoe designer, you would never brainstorm and sell a new running shoe without ensuring that it would actually benefit and interest athletes. In the same way, tracking changing conversion rates and calculating your social ROI will let you know if you’re actually connecting with your audience and generating results. If your brand isn’t prepared to monitor the effectiveness of digital content, it isn’t ready for social media.
Maintain Engagement
One of the simplest ways to encourage growth on social media is to maintain real-time social engagement. When followers feel heard, acknowledged, and most importantly, appreciated, they easily transition from numbers on a social app to customers loyal to your brand. To nail its social debut, your brand needs to do even more than consistently posting and tracking quality content to social media. To take full advantage of all social media offers, you need to engage with people in a personal, timely manner. We know, it sounds like a lot—but it’s worth it when you consider what social can do for your brand. Give it a try!
Social Media Marketing Success With Snap
While a strong social media presence can have a significant impact on customer engagement, especially in the current digital age, not every brand has the time and resources needed to maintain a social account. This is where Snap comes in. Our social media marketing experts are eager to step in and help your brand rock its social media debut. Reach out today to get started.