Social media has over 3.484 billion users, which translates into nearly 40% of the world’s population. This makes it one of the best places to market your brand and reach your target customers.
However, with changes in algorithms and ever-increasing competition, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. Here are some secrets to social media success that you must know to grow your brand online:
1. Have a Strategy in Place
Just like every other form of marketing, it’s crucial to have a social media marketing strategy in place. The strategy not only brings your entire team to the same page but also helps you align all of your efforts in the same direction.
The social media strategy should clearly define your goals so that at all points, your efforts are focused on them. Additionally, it must mention your target audience and brand persona. This will help you stay consistent on social media and also help you to tailor your content to the requirements of your customers.
2. Choose Top Social Networks
While studying your target audience, you also need to determine their preferred forms of content. Based on this, their choice of social media platform will vary too. For instance, if your target audience prefers just images and videos, Instagram may be the best platform for them.
You need to take note of the platforms where your target audience is the most active and ensure that you make your presence felt there. Most of your social media marketing efforts must be concentrated on these social networks to ensure that you reach a majority of your target audience.
3. Don’t Be Narcissistic
One of the biggest mistakes that brands can make on social media is that of tooting their own horns all the time (which goes hand-in-hand with other social media mishaps like complaining and badmouthing). You need to understand that your posts needn’t always be about you or your employees. On social media, your goal must be to provide high-quality, relevant, and engaging content to your audience.
It’s a good idea to inform your audience about the latest trends in the industry or even offer them tips to solve their problems. If you always post about your brand, people may start viewing you as a narcissistic brand and might move away from you.
4. Leverage Influencers
Influencers are social media personalities who’ve got tremendous fan-followings on social media. Their followers identify them as industry thought leaders and engage with them on a personal level. You can use this influence of social media personalities to promote your brand on social media.
When the influencers talk positively about your brand or products, their followers may start taking an interest in your brand. This can help increase your reach, engagement, and may even get you some customers.
However, you need to be wary of who you partner with. There are many fake influencers out there who are just in it for partnering with brands but have nothing much to offer. To find genuine influencers from locations of your choice, you can use platforms like Influence.co. This platform also lets you search for influencers based on their niche.
Image via Influence.co
5. Create Courses
If you own an online business, you can create courses relevant to your industry and promote them on social media. If you offer valuable courses for free, you might attract numerous keen learners.
They can like, engage with, and share your courses within their circles. This can help you increase your brand’s reach and you can even redirect this traffic to your website.
Since well-curated courses provide valuable information, this strategy can help you build trust and improve the credibility of your brand.
Image via Kajabi
To create an online course, you can use platforms such as Kajabi. It makes it easy for you to create online courses and customize content, thanks to helpful “blueprints” that map out your course’s basic structure.
You can use the platform to create surveys and quizzes to further engage your social media followers, while Kajabi’s tag-based marketing automation allows you to segment and nurture leads based on their survey responses.
Thinkific is another excellent option for creating courses. You can learn more about the key differences between Kajabi and Thinkific here.
6. Engage with Your Audience
Simply posting content on social media won’t get you far. You need to engage with your audience and put effort into building a social media community too. It should be your goal to reply to as many comments of your followers as possible. Additionally, you might also get personal messages from your audience. And you should put effort into replying to those as well.
While responding to your audience, you must remember your brand persona. The comments and messages must remain in-line with the persona that you’ve defined in your social media strategy. Having a style guide will help keep your brand persona consistent.
7. Pay Attention to Quality
Yet another secret to social media success is that of paying attention to quality over quantity. You might think that posting multiple times a day will help your brand gain more reach and engagement. However, that is only true if you can post high-quality content every time. Additionally, posting too frequently can alienate your followers as they may feel like you’re spamming them.
You need to find the right balance for posting content and must give priority to the quality of content. In many cases, a single high-quality post may gain more traction than multiple posts that are of lower quality. The key is to produce interesting content that will be just enough to keep people hooked to your profile until your next update.
You should plan and create an engaging content calendar for every month to gain more traction on social media.
8. Analyze and Optimize
Social media platforms give you access to detailed analytics that can help you understand your audience even better. You can see how well your posts have performed and also more about your audience demographics. Based on the analytical data, you can further tailor your posts to fit your audience’s requirements.
The analytics will also help you figure out when most of your audience is online during the day. These are the times when you should post your content to get maximum engagement.
Final Thoughts
Social media is a great place to promote your brand to reach your marketing goals. The key to social media success is to create high-quality, engaging content that can provide value to your audience.
Additionally, you must have a social media strategy in place and should engage with your audience as much as possible. Creating courses and partnering with influencers can be helpful too. Lastly, by going through analytics, you can further optimize your social media strategy,
Are there other secrets to social media success? Let me know in the comments.
How to Leverage YouTube Influencers for Your Brand