7 Ways You Can Use Social Media to Grow Your Business
Ever since their very inception, it became very clear that social media platforms will quickly outgrow their initial purpose of connecting and creating engaged online communities and eventually become very powerful marketing platforms. These hopes were, by all means, exceeded, and with a plethora of built-in marketing, corporate, and even ecommerce functions, social media sites and their pool of 4.2 billion active users now serve as some of the most powerful business growth tools you can imagine.
Well, let us take a look then at some of the most intuitive and effective strategies that will help you to use this critical platform to help your company grow, advertise and promote, and finally join the major league.
Pick the appropriate channels
The social media landscape is expanding at a rapid pace. And even though all these platforms pack their own sets of pros and cons, firing up on all cylinders and trying to reach every user on the planet will spread your resources too thin. For a start, we suggest that you research your customer base, see where their interests lie, and start with some of the top picks like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Once you establish a core follower base here, you will be ready to crack down on some more niche markets.
Follow through with the best social media practices
Every social media platform operates on a fine set of rules, posting frequencies, and user habits that can easily make or break your future marketing strategies. You can start tackling this problem by
checking some of the most important social media good practices and checking what the competition is doing. Seeing first-hand how brands in your industry are building their engaged communities and handling user interaction will provide you with excellent guidelines and milestones for future efforts.
Use ads deliberately
The social media paid ad systems are incredibly effective, precise, and deliberate. And they will be all but wasted if you use them with a shotgun approach and hope that enough new customers will end up hooked. Instead, you should set a strategic development plan, and use paid ads to fit this purpose. If you have trouble addressing problems at this scale, you can always look for a professional social media agency that will help you with setting goals, social media management, and ad management.
Create an in-depth content strategy
We are not talking only about the posting frequency which we have covered in one of the previous sections. If you want your content to create the desired effect, you need to make sure that publications are engaging, and informative, and encourage people to keep coming back for more. Using this approach together with consistent blogging, an internal website linking, and SEO can produce great cumulative results. But even on its own, social media content should lead the visitors down some sales funnel.
Keep the audience vigil and engaged
Quality content can go a long way in making your social media profiles a more fun place to spend time. But, not even the most interesting publications can’t save your strategy from tediousness if you keep relying solely on this one-way form of communication. Fortunately, by now, we are well aware of dozens of different strategies we can use to break up this pace. Some of the most popular options you can use include polls, call-to-actions, giveaways, challenges, referrals, and guerilla actions.
Share content and branch out
The social media landscape is built on networking. So, your social media marketing campaigns can only benefit if you put a conscious effort to get in touch with influential figures and engage in some form of cross-promotion. Keep in mind, though, that influencer marketing isn’t an instant guarantee for success – much like any other marketing approach this one also requires very careful planning. You can check three Rs of influencer marketing to get some basic guidelines for moving forward.
Set goals and measure success
Last but not least, we would like to remind you that all the efforts you are going to take need to be driven by specific, measurable, attainable, and time-limited goals. This data-driven and deliberate approach should be present throughout all later stages of your social media campaigns as well. You will make this job far easier if you take some time to establish relevant KPIs and measure everything you do. The data you will get makes an excellent starting point for future adjustments and new efforts.
In conclusion
So, there you have it – the top seven strategies you can use to make sure your social media profiles are used to the fullest extent and that you have strong foundations for growing and branching out. In this day and age, the competition in the digital marketing arena is incredibly stiff and relentless. With things as they are, your company doesn’t have the benefit of wasting any of its resources. The things we have covered above should put at least some of these worries to rest.
