Whether you’ve been active for years or just starting out, it’s now easier than ever to connect with your customers, generate leads, and grow your business using social media.
With more than 77% of the UK population active on social media, your potential audience has never been bigger. As the number of users grows, their demographics and usage can be broken down into several categories. Having an understanding of who and how people are engaging with social platforms can bring significant benefits for any business.
To help you effectively build awareness and drive engagement on any social media platform, we’ve pulled together the five steps to success.
1. Put a strategy in place
Begin by asking yourself “Who is my ideal audience, and what do I want to achieve?” Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or others, each platform has its own set of unique demographics, so focus on the platform that best meets your needs. Your brand doesn’t necessarily need to have a presence on every platform.
When you know who you’re trying to reach on what platform, you need to think about what type of posts work best on that platform and when engagement is at its highest? This will help to target your posts to the most relevant audiences later down the line. Each platform has best practices which can be easily found on Google. Taking a peak at your competitors’ accounts can also be useful.
2. Know your platforms
To ensure success on social media it’s important to remember that it’s built for peer-to-peer communication and as such businesses need to be sensitive to the nature of the platform.
Facebook users mainly use the service to message their friends and family, whereas Instagram users typically use this platform to share photos and videos, whilst Twitter users are there to keep up to date with the news and the world. Why does this matter? Well, creating content that doesn’t align with your business may alienate your target audience.
3. Target your ideal audience
So you’ve put together your strategy, you’ve got your platform choice(s) locked in. When it comes to creating your content, understanding the different demographics helps to ensure you create a focused message. Never make assumptions – these days more people aged over 50 are flocking to Facebook than ever before. The beauty of social media is the range of target options you can apply to your post, meaning it reaches only the relevant audience.
You need to think about:
- Who to target – who do you want to target to achieve your objective?
- How to target – how does this audience typically consume content?
- When to target – when are engagement levels at their highest?
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Once your creative has done its job and caught the viewer’s attention, it’s about delivering the two fundamentals of any ad: a value proposition and a call-to-action.
The value proposition is something that provides a clear benefit or advantage you can offer, so that potential customers choose you over your competitors. It could be product innovation, a particular expertise, or customer service. You know what you do better than anyone else, so make sure your customers know too.
Finally, the call-to-action is there to prompt an immediate response from an interesting party. This could be a button to click, a phone number to call, or a video to watch.
4. Measure your success
It’s important to keep track of the metrics. For example, if you’re posting on Facebook to encourage website views or calls then a common metric used to measure these would be cost per click. Keeping track of your campaign as it is running allows you to see your efforts in real time. Using analytical tools to gather insight on current campaigns gives you the chance to refine your campaign and better target your audience. Understanding what worked and what didn’t once the campaign has ended will better shape your future strategies. The analytics tools provided by the platforms are there to help you. Be sure to utilise them.
5. Be active and post regularly
When you sit down and create your strategy, you define the objective for the campaign. If you’re starting out, the first thing to do is to build an engaged audience who follow and interact with your business. But to ensure they continue to interact with you it’s important that you’re consistent with your level of activity, otherwise engagement will drop.
Remember: social media has the power to create a storm. Thanks to peer-to-peer recommendations, users can ask questions outside of their normal trusted sources such as friends and families. We often scroll through our feeds looking for answers and inspiration, and as such, social media is a powerful way for businesses to grow their brands.
We can help here. Take a look at our social media advertising solution and then speak to us about getting more business using social media.
