How to make your social media activity more effective

Social Media Marketing holds the key for an extensive range of businesses in unlocking their potential for expanding and gaining consumer recognition as a brand. In the business world, social media is used to target both businesses and consumers through a variety of channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Tik Tok.

One thing that all these channels have in common is that businesses utilise them to build awareness and target consumer engagement. Social media provides a great platform to get your business and brand in front of people and, from there, to start to build a relationship with potential customers to drive engagement and eventually to action in the form of sign-ups or purchases.

Engagement with social media activity can provide a fantastic measure of the quality and relevance of the content you are producing and can help validate your content strategy and approach. It is, however, also important to think beyond engagement. What good are 10,000 likes if none of those become a customer?

Here we take a look at 6 key considerations when looking at your approach to social media to make sure you are driving quality engagement and aligning with business goals.

1. Know your audience

The first step to increasing social media engagement for any business is to know your target audience. A firm understanding of your primary audience will enable your business to tailor its social media marketing toward this demographic. This will essentially curb the content you produce to be more appealing and relatable to this segment of consumers. Knowing your audience helps you determine which social media platform best suits your needs; LinkedIn and Facebook, for example, have very different roles and mindsets when people are using them. It also helps inform the type of content you might produce; what does your target audience care about? What keeps them up at night? Or what might they find useful to know?

In order to identify your target market, a business should conduct market research through surveys, profiling, and analytics, all of which can help you uncover the specifics of who your customers or targets are. This information will uncover information detailing the Demographic, Geographic, and Behavioural features of this audience.

Once you know your audience, you can create research-based content derived from what your target market likes the most. An example of this would be to see that your target market enjoys seeing content that is an eco-friendly and sustainable practice and then generating content that promotes sustainability and recycling. So effectively knowing your audience enables your business to relate better to its consumers.

2. Ask Questions

One of the best ways to engage consumers through social media is to ask questions and make the experience feel like a seamless conversation where their opinions and outlook are valued. Prompting your audience with an array of ‘what do you think’ strategies can be very useful in gaining engagement.

Probing consumers to answer questions or comment on their thoughts is extremely useful as people often have pre-existing opinions that they are willing to express for free. Utilising polls and “test your knowledge” engagement surveys are two important ways consumers are enticed to interact with brands. This interaction not only gives valuable data to a business but boosts engagement with consumers. Both Facebook and Twitter have options to create polls and questionnaires, a great way for businesses to make the first step in engaging a consumer’s attention.

3. Talk when you have something to say, not for the sake of it.

One of the most frequent mistakes we come across when it comes to social media marketing is businesses posting content 5+ times a week because they have read somewhere that it is best to post every day. Unless you have something interesting, informative, or valuable to say every day, this is a quick way to get your audience to start tuning you out.

Focus your social posting on the value of what you post, not the number of posts you do, quality over quantity will win out every time. Too often, businesses are focused on the output of their marketing team or agency as opposed to the outcome of the activity they are carrying out.

4. Cross-post content

Build once, use many. Cross-posting is an effective way for marketers to utilise multiple social media platforms to maximise their reach across consumers. Cross-posting involves posting the same content for a brand but across multiple platforms. This form of social media engagement enables a brand to use several platforms to engage different consumers, ensure everyone sees the hard work you have put into producing quality content and maximise the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Some of your customers might follow you on LinkedIn but not on Facebook. By posting your content across all platforms, you ensure maximum reach across your audience.

5. Utilise Social Media Tools

Utilising social media tools such as scheduling posts and utilising trending hashtags are ways in which a brand can increase its engagement with consumers. Social media tools that enable you to schedule posts on several platforms at once, such as Hootsuite, are tools that will undoubtedly help a business grow its engagement. Scheduling a time when a business will post on several social media sites at once not only is a professional look but maximises your engagement with consumers.

Utilising hashtags and trending words as a tool in social media can drive your engagement numbers through the roof. Hashtags that deal with specific events, celebrations, and dates bring new eyes to your posts. Using hashtags within a statement in relation to your brand is a clever and insightful way to boost your engagement. Hashtags are easy, free, and have the ability to attract new consumer interest whilst boosting your social engagement.

Ultimately, driving up social media engagement is only effective if you have an understanding of what goal you are trying to achieve. Not only will this help you plan content that is relevant to this, but it will give purpose and utility to this work. To achieve this, you need to have an active marketing plan in place that reflects your business goals. If you are unsure of how to translate your business strategy into a marketing plan, book a free consultation with our Marketing Manager to see how we can help you.

6. Don’t get distracted by vanity metrics

As we mentioned earlier, likes, shares, and retweets are all great metrics to help show if your content is of interest and resonating with your audience, but interesting doesn’t pay the bills. Make sure when you are assessing the impact of your social media and marketing strategy that you’re tracking everything back to business goals as much as possible.

Did that post help you build your newsletter database? Did it generate any leads for your sales team to chase up? Did it drive and purchases? These are all questions you should be asking about your content and the engagement it drives across all platforms.

This can often be difficult to measure accurately, and ensuring thorough tracking is in place to ensure you can measure the effectiveness of your activity is key, but it is well worth the effort when you can understand which posts are actually driving revenue for your business.

If you are interested in seeing how social media engagement can help you achieve some of your business goals and want to get a comprehensive strategic plan, get in touch and one of our marketing experts will see how we can help you.