Prior to the invention of the radio and television set, if a company wanted to expand their audience, a sales rep would fill up his car with gas and take that long drive across town or cross country. Thanks to the invention of the radio and TV set those days are long and gone. Because of radio and TV advertisers were able to expand their audiences far beyond what previously could have imagined. Then came the invention of the Internet and now brands and advertisers are limitless in expanding their audience reach. And since the creation of social media, brands are able to engage with their target audience on a personal level. But despite the vast amount of benefits social media offers, not all companies take advantage of them. But before you jump the gun and set-up a profile on every single social network, here are some effective strategies you could use in order to maximize your full social media potential.
1. Understanding Your Audience
A great social media strategy identifies your target audience and addresses why they use social media. Demographics are statistics and descriptions of a group of people, such as their location, age, gender, income, and education level, religion and ethnicity. Psychographics explain your audience’s lifestyles, values, opinions, interests, and attitudes. Demographic and psychographics will help you define your target audience.
Questions you should address when performing your psychographic analysis:
A. Why do they want to learn about your product or service?
B. How important is your product or service to your audience? For example, is it part of their
job or is it a personal interest?
C. How do they like to learn and get their information from? Is it video, audio, text, etc., and
on what device or channel?
D. What questions do they typically have about your product or service?
E. How knowledgeable are they about your industry and product or service?
2. Target Your Platforms
When starting out, you’re probably eager to get on every available platform i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. But it’s a good idea to start with one to three platforms. Focus all your efforts on those three and then expand your efforts to some others. The answers to your demographic and psychographic questions will help you determine which platform to target.
3. Create Great Content
Random posts won’t get you anywhere with your audience. If you know and understand your audience, then you will know what type of content they will engage with. You could simply do a Google search of your nearest competitor’s social media presence to get an idea of the type of content you can create for your brand.
4. Grow Your Followers
Miami Marketing Co has developed a formula we wish we could share for increasing your followers but the rule of thumb is that if you start with great content and starts following influencers and specific groups of people, chances are they’ll follow you back. Posting, sharing and commenting on others’ posts will help you earn followers and traffic itself.
5. Create Content on a Consistent Basis
Posting too many times a day will make your audience think your content is spam and not posting on a consisting basis will have you losing followers. Here’s a suggested ideal number to how one should post content.
• Twitter: No more than 3 times a day. Engagement on average decreases after the third tweet
• Facebook: No more than 2 times per day. The number of comments and likes drops
significantly after the second post.
• LinkedIn: 20 posts per month, which is about once per weekday. This will allow you to reach
about 60% of your audience.
• Google+: No more than 3 times a day.
• Pinterest: 5 times a day, or more. Top brands on Pinterest who adopted a multiple-times-per-
day posting strategy have experienced steady or rapid growth.
• Instagram: 1-2 times a day. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, statistics show that
Instagram doesn’t experience a drop-off in engagement for posting more.
6. Manage Traffic
The greatest social media strategy is not going to work without the actual analytical data. You need to monitor your efforts so you know what to improve on in the future. There are dozens of great free tools that provide analytical tools to help you with these statistics.
If you are looking for professional marketing assistance, don’t hesitate to contact us at (305) 389-0566. Our certified social media gurus are ready to jump on the growth of your channels. Let’s chat!
