10 Top Social Media Tips For Businesses

For businesses that are looking to increase brand awareness for their products or services and achieve high profitability, social media is the channel that can make this possible. There are many opportunities for a wide range of businesses and whether they have sales or brand objectives, they can achieve this through social media implementation.

Here are 10 tips to implement to boost social media success:

1. Use social media to research

Social media sites have a wealth of information about target audience interests, social lives, topics they enjoy and what they dislike. This is all helpful to creating and enhancing your brand, which is almost impossible to do with other online channels.

2. Use analytics

Use analytics tools provided by the social networks to understand your target audience, who they are, what their interests are, their demographics and locations. This helps you to target your messages effectively and you can also run ads to increase followers and traffic volumes. 3rd party analytics tools are available like Google Analytics which have a wealth of features to understand social actions on your site like visitors, shares, likes etc.

3. Add a Twitter card

To increase follower engagement and interest in your tweets, then consider adding Twitter cards to display images with your tweets. People are naturally drawn to images, and tweets which include them have over 30% engagement than those without, so no matter how targeted and well written your content is, you can gain more exposure and interest by including a Twitter card.

4. Run paid ads

Most leading social media platforms now have a paid ad platform that function similar to Google Adwords and Bing Ads. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have paid platforms or pay per click networks where you can create campaigns to drive traffic to your website and attract new customers.

5. Automate processes with tools

Use tools like SocialOomph, Hootsuite and Buffer to automate processes like tweets, schedules, follows, unfollows, retweets and others. This will save you a lot of time and help you do more.

6. Engage with followers and connections

Don’t just connect with people on social sites, you should actively create relationships and engage with your connections and followers.

7. Brand your profiles

Whether you represent a company brand or personal brand you need consistency throughout your social media profiles and website. So create a brand identity that includes your name, tag line, colours, messages etc that are essential to positioning yourself or your business. These identity elements should be part of your profiles because these are some of the most important things that visitors and customers will remember about you and your business.

8. Develop social media plan

Create a social media that covers the following elements sequentially:

A. Research your markets
B. Choose your social media objectives
C. Monitor competitors
D. Create a competitive advantage
E. Target your markets
F. Set your budgets
G. Implement your strategy
H. Track the results

9. Share varied content

To keep follower engagement high and gain more followers who have different needs, then you should vary your content on social media.

10. Monitor competitors

Using online tools like socialbakers you can analyse and monitor competitor actions, successes and failures and incorporate these finding in your social media strategy.

Summary

Download the free social media strategy template to plan your business social campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and other platforms. Also, contact me to discuss how to plan and implement your strategy and for general social media advice.