Social media has come as a boon for all kinds of businesses, particularly for the smaller ones with limited marketing budgets. By investing quality time and effort and adopting the right strategy and optimization, they can reach millions of target audiences.
If you are considering leveraging the wonderful tool, or are already using it for your marketing campaigns, this blog post will help you to optimize your social media accounts.
1. Perform a SWOT analysis before every campaign
The good old SWOT analysis (short for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is one of the most important and valuable strategic planning and management techniques to be invented in the 20th century. It’ll enable you to be effective in your social media campaigns. The idea is quite straightforward. For every campaign, create four quadrants and list out:
- The strongest attributes of your business.
- The existing weaknesses in your business.
- The opportunities that can enable you to achieve the campaign’s objectives.
- The potential threats to your campaign.
A trustworthy and reputable social media marketing company can perform a detailed SWOT analysis for you.
2. Research your best-performing competitors
This may sound like ‘spying’ on your best-performing competitors but the intention is to observe the types and quality of social media content your best-performing are conducting and learn from that.
After performing a SWOT analysis, visit some leading competitors’ social media pages and study their posts. Look at the types of content they are posting and find out their content’s performance from the ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. This will not only help you understand your competitors and the types of content but also your target audience and what types of content they like and engage with the most.
3. Plan and create different types of social media content
Take a look at the social media posts of some highly successful and top-performing businesses, you will find a few things in common. One of them is the use of a variety of content types. Ever wondered why they create various types of posts? That’s because different types of posts have different engagement rates and it helps them achieve different objectives.
For instance, with higher average engagement rates, short videos are more likely to entertain and educate the target audience. Whereas, on the other hand, e-books are excellent lead generation tools and give more in-depth and valuable content to the target audience.
To ensure an effective social media marketing strategy, plan and create different types of content for different social media platforms. Include photo posts, stories, videos, long-form guides, infographics, e-books, and others in the mix. Also, experiment with different types of content to connect with, educate, entertain, and inspire your target audience.
4. Make your posts personal and individualistic
Your brand is unique. So is your story. Then why should your social media posts be similar to others? Make your posts personal and individualistic by infusing your personality and giving your signature style to them. Use a distinct, engaging, and unique voice as well as throw in some humor and wit to make your posts resonate with the target audience.
Hire a team of creative and intuitive individuals who can come up with original ideas naturally and effortlessly. A reliable social media marketing firm can help you create original and unique posts and help you think outside the box.
5. Make your posts attractive and colorful
Just imagine, you are scrolling through your favorite social media newsfeeds. You came across a beautiful and aesthetically-pleasing post and just below it, there’s a dull and unappealing post. Which one would you like to see? The first one, of course! So would you be surprised if you got to know from a study that attractive social media content garners more views and shares?
Apart from making the posts look attractive, ensure they’re colorful and the colors match their mood and tone. The right colors will attract attention and make the posts vibrant. As per a study, colorful posts result in 42 percent increased attention than black and white posts.
6. Use hashtags strategically
Hashtags are phrases or words that have a pound sign (#) in their prefix. By using relevant hashtags, businesses can boost the visibility of their social media campaigns. They also enable businesses to leverage popular trends and reach a new target audience.
Different social networks have varying limits on hashtags. Instagram enables users to use a maximum number of 30 hashtags at once. On the other hand, Twitter recommends users not use more than two to three hashtags in a single tweet.
That’s the reason you must refrain from overstuffing it and using irrelevant hashtags in your social media captions. Too many hashtags can look spammy. Also, overstuffing hashtags reduces the engagement rate. A study found social media posts that contain less than four hashtags have higher engagement rates than posts with more than five hashtags.
7. Create a content calendar, post judiciously and consistently
For an effective social media strategy, creating a content calendar is extremely crucial. It’ll enable you to be consistent and organized with your social media postings. As per a 2021 B2B Content Marketing data, over 70 percent of successful businesses and marketers use content calendars.
While creating a content calendar make sure to schedule the posts in such a way that you don’t post too frequently and too much content. A Hubspot study found that businesses that published more than four posts daily witnessed a 60 percent decrease in their engagement rate. Another SproutSocial study found that businesses that post too much content risk losing sizeable followers.
8. Regularly engage with community members
Last but not the least; engage with your community members regularly. Read as many comments and questions as you can and be prompt with the responses. While engaging with them, find out what they expect from your business and how you can serve them better. The frequent interactions and engagement will enable you to forge a strong relationship with them and win their respect and loyalty.
Finally, it may be concluded
If you are using social media or planning to use it, then optimizing your social media accounts is the first thing you must do before starting your campaigns. The eight tips in this post are just some of the basics of optimizing social media campaigns, and if you want to be successful, you must thoroughly research and execute all eight tips. If you don’t want to become too involved, you can hire a social media agency to handle it.
Over the years, a large number of businesses have recognized the potential of social media and have started using it for their marketing campaigns. But only a few of them know how to optimize their accounts and use them strategically, which enabled them to get more followers and reach out to new target audiences. If you are using social media or planning to use it, then optimizing your social media accounts is the first thing you must do before starting your campaigns.