It’s not as easy as it sounds, but we can walk you through 6 of the best practices!

Spending hours researching online the best ways to engage with your social media audience can be taxing to say the least. Each platform has different optimization practices, metrics, and ever-changing algorithms that feel like you can never keep up. Where do you start, and is it even worth it? The answer is a resounding YES – but there are ways to approach it without feeling like you’re spinning in circles.

Social Media Marketing is becoming more important by the day. There are almost twice as many social media users as there were just five years ago – and it is projected to continue to grow at a rapid pace. Not only are the number of users growing, each one of them spends an average of 3 hours per day on social media channels – scrolling and swiping to your heart’s content.

This offers a huge opportunity for businesses to grow brand awareness, develop and retain customer relationships, and even create more seamless lines of communication.

Whether you’re just starting to build your social media presence, wanting to take it more seriously and start to see results, or a high-output social media guru looking to optimize further – we’ve put together a list of essential social media marketing tips you will need to get your business going in 2022!

Build a Strategy

Every successful business venture starts with a solid plan. Utilizing social media tools can help you streamline your strategy, but to really thrive online, the time and effort required is still a huge investment into your business.

Without a plan, there is no clear goal for what you’re trying to achieve. Which means there’s no way to know if you’re getting the desired result you’re after. Then what’s the point?

Marketing can mean different things to different businesses. Are you looking to create an online presence for your business, increase brand awareness or establish your brand as an industry leader? You might even want to combine several different options. But unless you know where you want to go, you’re unlikely to get there. Here is more info on how to achieve meaningful social media goals.

Use a Business Account (even if it’s for a personal brand or product)

A business account gives you access to features you can’t use with a personal account, including insights, ads, shopping, multiple messaging inboxes, contact information and call to action buttons on your profile. There are free and paid options that are both very economical in starting a marketing campaign. Even if you’re developing a personalized skincare brand, or training course with your name on it, a business account is still the way to go.

Know your audience

Take the time to do some background research on your audience. Who are they? What do they like? What don’t they like? Be specific. When we are building out strategies, we always create ‘Customer Profiles’ – each customer profile says the background, age range, and personality of our average customer, or the customers we are trying to target. The more specific you can be, the better (we even give ours names and photos) – it might feel strange at first to build out such a specific persona, but it will give you tremendous insight and context for how to think about what your audience wants. This will give you a lens to think about all your future decisions through “What would our Customer Profile think about this?”

This Customer Profile will be a great resource when filtering options for your social media ads.

Establish your visual approach & create compelling content

Once you’ve decided what type of content to publish and what will resonate best with your audience, next it’s important to establish visual consistency. Building a consistent visual approach means that your posts have a consistent color scheme, look, and feel. Stay on brand.

Color influences buying decisions and brand recognition. Your social media accounts should be consistent across your posts and platforms (if you choose to be on more than one) helping followers easily recognize your content in their feeds. Consistency is key.

Create great captions and relevant hashtags

Your brand voice is just as important as your brand look – it should also be consistent across all posts. People tend to scan captions rather than read them thoroughly, you want to get all the important information into those first two lines! (or at least enough to grab their attention so they want to read more)

Hashtags are crucial for increasing your account’s visibility and discoverability. We recommend using between five and nine hashtags per post. More than that can look like hashtag stuffing, a spammy tactic that turns followers off. Choose hashtags that are relevant and specific to your brand and your audience.

If your brand new to hashtag optimization, find an account you think is doing really well and study 10-15 of their posts (it doesn’t have to be an account in your industry, you can use any account that is successful). See what hashtags they are using and how they relate to their brand and audience – this will help kickstart some ideas to A/B test. Then once you’ve done a few posts, be sure to review and compare how each hashtag combinations performed and continue to refine.

Engage, engage, engage!

If you want engagement with customers, you have to engage with them. Posting quality content is great, but if you ignore comments and never interact with any other profiles, your brand will have a lonely existence online. At a minimum, respond to comments users leave on your feed or posts. But also seek out similar accounts in your niche, follow them, and like and comment on their posts too. Make thoughtful comments, especially until you develop a strong relationship.

If someone tags you in a post, check it out and look for opportunities to engage. Re-share in your feed or in your story! Pinning comments from top fans, or simply comments that are likely to spark conversations, is a way to encourage more engagement on your posts.

This makes it more fun, personalized, and you develop genuine connections with your audience along the way.

Last, continually refine strategy with analytics

No matter how good your social media presence is, it can always be improved. The best way to improve your results is to learn from what you’ve already done – use the data available given on each platform to analyze your performance and track your progress.

Remember to set clear and effective goals, build out a cohesive strategy, define and cater to your audience, create compelling and consistent posts and captions, and most importantly engage with your audience!

If you’re still feeling a bit overwhelmed or have questions, we have a team here to guide you. Feel free to send us an email or DM!   

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draftcreativegroup.com