Table of Contents
- 1. Create a strategy and understand your audience
- 2. Choose the right social media platform for your business
- 3. Keep industry trends in-check
- 4. Optimize your profile
- 5. Bet on native content
- 6. Relevancy is the key
- 7. Interact with your customers
- 8. Evaluate your impact
- 9. Conclusion
Those days are far left behind when businesses relied upon traditional marketing to reach their target audiences. As the immense popularity of social media platforms increased, businesses flocked towards them for better brand exposure and to better market their product and services.
The evolution of social media platforms from simply connecting the users to helping them gain new perspective and information have made it one of the heavily trafficked places on the internet.
According to a report provided by Statista, 2020 recorded over 3.6 billion social media users worldwide and that number is expected to grow to a whopping 4.41 billion by 2025.
With the ownership of four of the largest social media/messaging services (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp), Facebook dominates the social media landscape. Image source: Statista.
Social media is embedded within the lives of people; therefore, it presents an astonishing opportunity for all kinds of businesses to utilize it for getting deep insight into consumer behaviour.
Nevertheless, with many businesses and varied content available on the internet to serve this huge pool of audience, standing out from the crowd has become essential than ever before.
The realm of social media is constantly evolving. Be it the rapid change in users’ intent or the updates in algorithms, it is difficult for marketers and businesses to keep up with the transformation.
However, if done right, social media campaigns can help bring better brand exposure as well as an immense increase in ROI.
This article will help you in breaking down some of the essential ways to increase your business's reach on social media platforms.
1. Create a strategy and understand your audience
When it comes down to the measure of success for any marketing campaign, setting clear, achievable goals for your business is vital. Without goals and a proper strategy to achieve those goals, your social media campaign will most likely fail.
Similarly, being indecisive of your target audience does no good.
It’s like inviting your friends over for a dinner, but you still have not decided on the menu and number of people. Sounds like a disorderly plan, right?
Setting up a list of tasks and a schedule to accomplish those tasks is the first step towards a successful social media campaign. Utilizing tools like Google Calendar will help you and your team members to remain updated with the content plan and additional changes.
Alongside a to-do list and content calendar, preparing a proper budget plan that aligns with your strategy can make your tasks more achievable.
Secondly, in order to unlock success on social platforms, you must have a deep understanding of your customers. Creating a target persona where you profile your ideal audience helps you to better learn about your customers and prospects.
You can create a target persona by asking essential questions such as who is your target audience, what is your targeted demographics, the level of understanding of your audience, etc.
Contiki Vacations, a tour operator came up with this detailed infographic for the travel agents to better understand its audience and plan successful events. Image source: TravelPulse.
As it is a composite sketch of your ideal customer, the target persona helps create an effective lead generation strategy for your sales and marketing team.
2. Choose the right social media platform for your business
According to another survey done by Statista, a large share of consumers made purchases based on something they saw on their social media.
This increase has pushed many businesses to hold a misconception that the more platforms you join, the more brand exposure you are likely to receive. Unless you are an already established mega brand, this strategy doesn’t reciprocate with all kinds of businesses.
Regardless of holding all kinds of quantifiable audience sizes and demographics, it is essential to understand that each social media platform tends to be popular among a like-minded group.
For instance, the younger generation tends to be more active on visual-based platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, or Tiktok. Therefore, these platforms could be ideal for businesses like food, travel, art, beauty, etc.
Facebook is a highly popular social media platform for B2C businesses. Therefore, these businesses can utilize its feature “Marketplace” and Facebook Ads to promote and sell its product and services.
LinkedIn is an active platform for B2B businesses and older audiences. It has proven to be an effective site for lead generation, and hence produces more leads than Facebook, blogging, and Twitter individually.
Now, this is the part where you can again utilize your target persona and identify which social platforms are popular among your audience, and focus on those channels.
Image source: Snapshot (LinkedIn Website)
Select and stay active on the top two or three channels with the most active target audiences to ensure that your contents and posts receive effectual engagement. The higher your engagement, the more likely you are to attract people to buy your product or services.
However, tracking down each social media platform to decide which might be an ideal option for your social media campaign can be a bit overwhelming.
Social media analytics tool eases such hectic task by channeling down the popular social platforms with high engagement rates among your audience and industry.
Alongside giving a better insight into your audience, tools like Mandala Analytics are resourceful in better understanding which platform will best serve the purpose of your social media campaign.
Mandala Analytics uses AI and machine learning to retrieve data from all the social media platforms and segment them down engagement-wise. Image Source: Mandala Analytics dashboard
3. Keep industry trend in-check
One of the major keys to success on social media platforms is: keeping yourself updated with the trends.
Let’s assume you are pushing content constantly on your social media platforms, but they fail to gain a lot of engagement. One of the reasons could be that your posts’ context lack trendiness.
Rapid transitions in user behaviour where the necessity to stay current have given rise to the trends. Following trends helps people stay acquainted with new topics or even provide answers to their typical questions such as where to eat, what to wear, what to buy, where to go, etc.
Be it a small business or a big brand, everyone needs to stay relevant to their audiences to maintain their interest in you. Remaining traditional or unmindful of trends can block you from connecting with new or young audiences.
For example, you are at a theme-based party, but you didn’t follow the theme because you failed to read the invitation properly. Appearing to be like the odd one throughout the party, you will probably get cut off of many group pictures. What a bummer!
Monitoring trending topics can help you produce contents that are relatable to your target audience and gain more engagement. Alongside learning new trends, monitoring helps know the gap in your marketing efforts and presents new opportunities and ideas.
Monitor industry topics, keywords, hashtags, and emoji, trending in your country with the help of Cosmos Trends by Mandala Analytics. (*Limited to only a few countries for now*). (*The feature for sorting the results based on the industries will soon be available*).
Get access to all the trending keywords, hashtags and emojis from Cosmos Trends by Mandala Analytics, and power your content marketing strategy. Image Source: Mandala Analytics dashboard.
Although multiple factors can impede the reach of your social media platforms, an unoptimized profile and its content perhaps could be the most damaging of them all.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is equally important for your brand as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). How well your profile and contents are optimized conveys how much of a brand image and customer satisfaction matters to you.
You can optimize your social media profiles by below-mentioned steps:
- Keep your username the same on all the social media platforms as it helps the audiences to find you easily. Different names can generate confusion for your audiences.
- Profile picture sets the first impression of your brand, helping you stand out from the crowd. It must include your logo and brand name.
- Use your social media account’s bio to give details about your brand or business. Your bio represents your brand and helps new searchers to know about you.
- Your profile must include links that redirect to your website and other platforms as it helps drive traffic to your website.
Alongside practicing these mentioned steps, make sure to integrate your profile and content with keywords. As millions of searches are performed on social media platforms per minute, it is essential to make sure that you appear while your audiences and prospects are looking for you.
Perform thorough research of keywords before adding them to your profile. Add highly searched relevant keywords, though try to avoid too many as this will give rise to keyword stuffing.
Use tools like Google Trends and features by social media such as trending search and terms by Facebook, Google’s trending keywords, etc., to identify the most ranked keywords.
Every social media platform is structured in a way that prioritizes user retention. These platforms must keep user usage at the highest possible level to keep making revenue. Businesses posting native content is one of the ways that helps these platforms to achieve that objective.
Many marketers cross-promote their content on multiple platforms, which is a good strategy to increase brand visibility. However, if you are aiming for more engagement rate on social media, opting for native content increases shareability.
Sharing links and pushing sponsored ads to drive less engagement as they either are less appealing or disrupt the user experience.
While native ads, in comparison to promotional and sponsored ads, provide a more seamless experience to the users as they align properly with other content. Therefore, native content has higher CTRs (click-through rates) and are most likely to appear frequently on users’ feed.
For example, Instagram’s explore section and Facebook’s feed features native ads on the feed of users with similar interests.
Instagram’s explore page features native ads which provide a seamless experience and also gets successful at grabbing the attention of the user.
Facebook’s Instant Articles and LinkedIn’s LinkedIn Pulse features native long-form content such as blog posts and articles. Such features are advantageous for publishers and industry professionals to share industry insights and increase brand visibility.
With so much information constantly pouring on the internet, users find it difficult to process it all at once. Since the last decade, there is an extreme decline in users’ attention span where it has dropped to less than that of a goldfish.
According to the data collected by Facebook, on average, users engage 1.7 seconds with a piece of content on the platform, compared to 2.5 seconds on the desktop.
Such a drop poses challenges for the businesses to sustain the interest or grab the attention of their target audiences. It is high-time businesses adapt the practice of sharing content that is relevant to their customers.
But how will you learn what’s relevant to your customers and prospects?
1. Opting for A/B style testing: Start to push versatile content and analyze each of them to learn which one attracts more engagement, one way to understand the interest of your audience. However, this way works only if you have a team specifically putting efforts to analyze each social media platform.
2. It’s all about the timing: Social media platforms constantly update the user’s feed and with tons of content already present, your post likely gets lost in the wave. To make sure you are reaching your audience efficiently, know what time your audience is most active and is highly likely to interact with your posts.
3. It all comes down to visuals: Platforms like TikTok have become giant, thanks to its video-only focused content that appeals more to the younger generation. The instant growth of TikTok resulted in other platforms emulating its features, for example, Instagram launched Reels to grab attention to its platform.
By staying at the forefront, visual-focused app, TikTok has seen immense growth in recent years. It is the fastest growing app with over 1 billion users. Image source: WARC.
According to Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, video-focused posts drive more engagement when compared to other forms of content. Video tends to attract the user’s attention for a longer time, therefore the algorithms on social media push video-focused posts more often.
4. Spice things up with humour: According to a survey conducted on consumer engagement, posts that include humour or emotion tend to attract more engagement when compared to the ones with mentions of price and deals.
Behavioural targeting can help you understand - what is relevant and appealing to your audience and strengthen your marketing campaign.
Huge organizations over the past years have heavily invested in analytics tools that analyze their audience’s social media engagement. For example, alongside channelling down the engagement rate, popular keywords, geolocation, top mention, Mandala analytics can help you learn the prime time of your audience from each platform.
Such information can help you post the right content on the right platform and to the right audience and hence receive maximum exposure.
A comprehensive social media analytics platform, Mandala Analytics provides essential information such as the prime time of your audience on social media platforms, their demographics, sentiment, etc., to help you in making right business decisions.
7. Interact with your customers
When you post, comment, or share on your social media platform, you are virtually interacting with not just one but a whole pool of customers and prospects. The way you engage and how often you engage demonstrate how much customer interaction is important to you.
Social media is like a sandcastle built of plenty of positive feedback where one hit of negative feedback could destroy your presence.
Even the way you handle negative feedback or a dispute reflects your brand’s personality. Therefore, it is best to provide a solution politely rather than engaging in a dispute with your customers. Lack of interaction and impolite interaction leads to providing a golden opportunity for your competitors to snatch away your customers.
Whether you are a mega-brand or a small coffee shop, it is essential to personalize with your audience and provide a personal touch, or you will end up losing them.
Quizzes, polls, comment boxes are some of the ways you can interact with your customers and know their feedback towards your services. It can also help you realize and implement future business ideas.
Knowing the level of impact, you gained from each of your social media campaigns is highly essential as it tells whether or not you are hitting the right target.
Whether your campaign was a success? Whether you hit the right audience? Whether or not you succeed in providing value to your customers? Are you capable of deploying flexible strategies?
These are some questions whose answers will help you evaluate your growth.
Although all social media platforms come with inbuilt analytics, tools like Google Analytics help check your performance and evaluate the success of your social media campaigns.
Keeping track of your KPIs will help you measure your success and realize the areas which need improvement.
With so much content available and constant upgrades in social media algorithms, maximizing brand awareness has become more difficult than ever.
Implementing mentioned strategies can help you not only achieve maximum exposure but also build a better brand presence.
However, keeping track of each aspect could be overwhelming. Still, Mandala Analytics does not just help you keep track of your growth and reach but also helps in saving time and running a successful social media campaign effectively.
Sign up for a 7-day free trial and stay ahead of the game by learning your audience's interest and hence developing the right content strategy for your social media campaign with Mandala Analytics.
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