
The modern consumer is aggressive in their search for brands to trust and buy from. And in an increasingly digitized world, social media accounts are the best places to reach new audiences and engage current clients. Social media platforms are essential representations of brands and businesses that deserve attention and care.
There are solid statistics that support this. According to Digital 2022 Global Overview Report – a study published by the folks from We Are Social and Hootsuite – most users spend at least two hours on social media platforms. And almost 30% of their time is spent on online shopping.
This further underscores the importance of your business’s presence across social media platforms. What content you feed your audience makes or breaks their perception of you and what you sell. An improvement in brand loyalty only comes with consumers’ candid interaction with you and your content, most especially online.
Key Factors to Consider About Your Audience
Understanding the need to improve your business’s social media presence is just the first step to see overall growth in your brand reputation. The second and equally important step is getting to know your audience.
Here are important factors to consider about your audience:
- Basic demographics and psychographics: You can begin by understanding the important facets of your target audience. Common points can be about the age range they belong to, their geographic location, buying power, and gender. Be as creative and detailed as you can about painting the profile of your desired clientele. This can include analyzing their lifestyle choices, purchasing behavior and values.
- Needs, motivations, and pain points: This time, think about the needs and wants of your target audience. Note down any problems or negative experiences that consumers might be having. Your product, content, or services should address these factors and offer a solution that improves their overall consumer experience.
- Online behavior: After establishing a picture of who your target audience is and what they need, it’s time to understand their online behavior. Ask yourself the following: What does your audience look for when scrolling through their feed? What tickles their curiosity and encourages them to read or click? What type of content engages them the most and in what format?
These are just a few questions you can start with. Be as creative and detailed as you can, but make sure you ask questions with answers you can find. - Preferred communication style: The next most rational thing to do after getting to know your audience is to gauge their preferred communication style. For starters, you can ask: Who are you trying to reach with your content? How would they like this content to sound and look like? On which platform can you most effectively reach them?
Your Guide to Building a Strong Social Media Presence
The following are top strategies to help you build your social media presence and thus, increase organic engagement with your brand.
- Produce top-notch content: Nothing attracts and retains audiences better than well-curated and personalized content. You can add value to your products or services by creating posts that educate, empower, or entertain. This way, you not only fulfill the main objective of your business but also set the bar high in customer service by having engaging content that sticks to their memory.
- Remain true and consistent with your brand guidelines: Writing and producing great content is just one thing. It’s equally important to maintain harmony with your brand’s goals and vision. This can be done by setting flexible and memorable brand guidelines that your content team can sustainably follow throughout the year.
- Be organized – curate posts using a content calendar: To avoid burning out your content team, encourage them to integrate a content calendar into their routine.
An effective calendar helps creators understand content life cycles and be more attuned to ever-changing consumer trends. By diligently maintaining a content calendar, you not only save time but also have the creative team brimming with ideas that engage audiences all year round.
- Use high-quality images and visuals: Regardless of the social media platform you use, having high-quality visuals is a must. The two things to remember when it comes to visuals are accessibility and appeal.
As the world becomes increasingly mobile-centric, try to accommodate visual formats that fit computers, mobile phones, tablets, and other devices. Also, do your best to have simple yet captivating and valuable graphics for your posts or videos. - Encourage user-generated content: Perhaps, one of the lesser known strategies for boosting brand awareness is user-generated content (UGC). Simply put, UGCs are forms of content across social media platforms created by users themselves. These can be in the form of reviews, vlogs, product unboxings, paid ads, and yes, even memes.
This goes to show that with the right prompts, you can influence your current audience pool to generate content of their own and do the marketing for you. This also forms bridges between one consumer and the next, as people would likely trust honest reviews and feedback from someone they can relate to rather than just an online article. - Stay on top by using search engine optimization (SEO) and analytics. With all the content your team has put out, it’s time to track how they’re performing. With modern analytics tools, you can analyze your post’s performance in terms of reach, engagement, and ranking. You can go further by using SEO tools to conduct a comprehensive auditing of your posts.
- Engage with the community: One big green flag for consumers is quick customer service and a feeling of being encouraged to ask questions and provide suggestions. In a way, this is what community engagement truly means. It is to ensure that people have a space online where they feel safe and taken care of when making inquiries about products, raising issues or requesting assistance.
Summary
Truly, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for attracting your target audience and boosting your organic social media engagement. Often, it takes a combination of the aforementioned strategies to obtain desired results.
Take into consideration your budget and time as well. What are the things that you can do now as a business to get to your goal? You can follow these strategies without spending a dime and by looking for free tools on the web, and setting realistic goals and milestones along the way.
Building your social media presence doesn’t need to be a hassle or stressful. After all, these initiatives are in place to ensure maximum customer satisfaction. We can only get more creative from here on out.