Social media is no longer a maybe — using social networks to connect with your customers, for free, is an essential part of running a business in 2020. But, social media can be difficult to master and slow to get started. Choose one or two social networks to focus on where your target audience spends the most time. Then, to focus your efforts and build your business on social media, try these five ideas.
Set clear goals that are easy to measure.
What do you hope to accomplish on social media in 2020? Setting a goal helps focus your efforts and is essential to keeping your social media campaign on track. Once you have set your goal, however, take it one step further. Determine how you will measure that goal. List the social media metrics that you will monitor to determine how successful you are at achieving that goal, such as the follower count, engagement, or post reach.
Share content, not commercials.
Too often, businesses treat social media like one big commercial. Don’t. Instead, share posts that are useful to your followers. Share tips, advice, insight, inspiration, or even, if it’s on brand, humour. Posts on sales and promotions should be a small percentage of what is shared on your page. Sharing content from other pages is another way to build your page without loosing followers for sounding like a commercial.
Get creative with strategy.
There’s more than one way to create success on social media platforms. Brainstorm options to jump start your social media, and choose more than one strategy as you move forward in order to create a variety of content. Remember to treat social media as a conversation and engage with users, commenting on other posts and not just creating your own posts. Giveaways are another good strategy for growing your follower count, as well as creating hash tags.
Schedule posts.
Once you have a goal and strategy, start scheduling posts. Set aside one day a week or one day a month to schedule posts to your page. This both ensures that you have a regular stream of content and encourages more thought-out posts. Avoid scheduling too far in advance, or you won’t be able to use the information that you’ve learned from determine what posts are successful and which ones are not.
Use analytics to adjust your strategy.
No matter what network you use, it likely has some analytics that tell you how each post performs. Don’t neglect this data. Look at your most successful posts. What time of day were they shared? What content did you use? What format? Using analytics, you can recognise trends such as the best time of the day to share, or perhaps that asking a question increases the engagement on a post.