BUILDING YOUR BRAND: 10-Point Social Media Strategy

Branding is an essential part of doing business and social media is emerging as one of the most powerful tools. To explore the treasure of opportunities social media offers, you need to create powerful social media strategies that with resonate and strike an instant connect with your audience (the target market).

Business Review Australia highlights 10 top social media strategies for your business >>>

10 PROVEN STRATEGIES FOR ENHANCING BUSINESS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

1. Identify your target market

First and foremost, you have to decide what your target market is and who your target audience are. Knowledge about the demographics of your target market including age, gender, location, economic strata and common interest can play a crucial role in tapping the interest of your target market and keep them engaged.

If you are selling a product for women; then your target market is women and you can create a niche by targeting a certain age group or category.

2. Know the interest

Understanding the interest of your target market is an essential step towards building a strong community in social media circles. What is it that makes them give a ‘like’, tweet’, ‘pin it’ or ‘share’? What do they find the most interesting to initiate interaction and engage in discussions?

Always remember the context through which these people have connected to you through social media, what has brought them here? Do not go overboard and post only relevant content.

3. Post regularly and stay connected 

A recent study indicates that most big brands (about 60 percent) post regularly – a minimum of one post every day, however you can build up a strong community gradually by initially posting 3 or 4 times a week.

In short, there is no hard and fast rule; it is all about understanding the pulse of your audience. If you find a sudden surge in the number of ‘Unlikes’, put the brakes on – it is time to reconsider your social media strategy. However, to garner optimum social media success, you should post about 1-4 times a day on Facebook and 5-10 times a day on Twitter.

4. Use your brand assets 

Big brands, SMEs and start-ups alike sometimes forget to harness the benefit of their own assets. Remember, the people who have come on your social media site are interested in the context of your business and the products and services you are offering. So. It is imperative that you share the details of your website content on the social space. Why look elsewhere for content ideas, while you have been growing it in your backyard.

5. Maximizing engagement 

Most social networking sites have people in their community who come to the site regularly, but do not engage in any activity. Are they any good for your business? Well, surveys have shown that these ‘non-participating’ members of your community may click through your website URLs and even make purchases.

6. Plan your content

Plan and schedule a calendar for your content as to what to post when. One of the basic rules of social media is to make post relevant to what is happening around you at that time – it may be a season, festival, etc. Just as you would not interested in discussing candles for Christmas in January, there might a whole lot of people who would not mind discussing discount sales in January, post-Christmas. One good way to follow what is trending at the moment is Google Trends or Twitter.

7. Hashtags facilitate quick search

The use of hashtags (#) in content is fast emerging as a powerful tool in social media. Not only does hashtags make it easy to track a promotion’s activity across many social media platforms, it also serves the purpose of unification. This means guided by hashtags, you can track all the discussions that is happening across all the major network. Finding conversations of people using hashtags is easier as they are more likely to engage in social conversations.  

8. Use social media to offer support

Using social media platform as an interactive tool is essential because it is normal human instinct to seek answers to problems. For the endless number of people who visit your website or have made purchases from it in the form of products or services would have something to ask – as Social media can be their only medium to interact with the virtual merchant.

Be quick to offer a solution like ‘Please contact the support team at [email protected] and your queries will be responded in the next 24 hours’. Doesn’t that sound responsible?

9. Maintain uniform brand identity

10. Be true to your audience

There are also few other ways as to how you can enhance business through social media, like using the right voice to talk to your audience, and stay updated about the current trends in the industry using online tools like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare, etc.  And last but not the least, keep your social media team updated on their goals and inspire them to perform better by showing them the result of their efforts.

About the Author

Ellis McGrath is a Business Development Manager with VITEB; leading web development agency in India having team of professional web developers, PHP developers and Magento developers in India. He leverages latest social media strategies to improve bottom-line results for clients across the globe. Find us on LinkedInand Facebook.