Just sharing contents or visuals on social media will not automatically generate visitors, engagement and sales. We need to create a mechanism behind the content, share and grab the attention.
1. Recognize Who Is Your Audience
First of all we need to recognize our audience. Without knowing who is your audience, you cannot connect with them. No matter what is your brand you have to have an understanding of your audience’s demographics – age, gender etc as well as a better understanding of their interests, needs, mindsets, and behaviors to truly make a connection and become an important part of their lives. Besides the standard methods of audience discovery – industry research, focus groups, and brand surveys – you can also use social media data to build audience personas. Social monitoring software, Facebook custom audience, social referrals to your website, and forum where people can ask questions are just a few of the sources you can use to learn more about your audience.
2. Add Value
Ideally the content you post to your social media must provide some sort of value to your audience. That value could be anything such as education, increased productivity, entertainment, or cost savings. To the consumer, it shouldn’t seem like marketing, even though we know it is by nature. It’s providing long-term awareness and brand recall. It’s making sure your brand is right there with the consumer at each step along their path to purchase so that when it comes time to make a decision, you’re the first brand that comes to their mind.
3. Focus On Limited Channel
If you company is big brand that is different story. Otherwise it’s unlikely your customers are scattered across multiple social media platforms. It doesn’t mean you need to go across all social media channel and start publishing your contents. So, to make the most of your limited time and resources, find the one or two channels that most of your ideal audience is using. Then, gradually move to the next channel.
4. Make two-way Conversation
Companies tend to talk only about themselves, their products, services, features, benefits, staff and so on. On the other hand, customers don’t want to hear about this. They want to know what else your brand can do for them. So, to start the conversation content needs to be compelling to the audience not necessarily directly talks about products or brands. For example if you are in food industry – talk about healthy food/recipe that compels audience and also speaks to your core brand.
5. Know Your Quality
Normally, people share things not only because they look good, but because those things make them look good. If your content is cropped inappropriately or appears blurry, it’s probably not going to get shared by users on social media channels.
6. Measure Success Metrics
It is very important that you clearly define the metric that you want to achieve such as awareness (impressions, reach, mention), engagement (like, shares, time on site), action (visits, clicks, referral, leads, sales) etc.
Once you know who your audience is and how you can add value to them, identifying extra distribution channels, integrating SEO, and creating a solid social media plan for measurement, you can ensure your content has enough strength to make a buzz across social media channels.