4 Reasons Your Social Strategy Sucks (and How to Fix It)

Over the last couple of decades, social media marketing has grown from being a tech curiosity to an indispensable part of business operations for entrepreneurs alike. In our ultra-connected world in which we’re all vying for the attention of consumers, the right approach to social media can help you cut through the noise. Unfortunately, it’s also very easy to get it wrong. 

Unlike other forms of marketing, social media marketing has an immediacy to it. Using newsletters or emails can be effective — there is a range of free email marketing services that can help you to design engaging, long-form content. On the other hand, social media requires certain brevity and tends to be more nuanced. The wrong post is immediately shareable across the planet and able to affect your reputation. 

So, let’s take a look at the likely reasons your social media strategy sucks right now. Where can you make improvements? What tools can help you along the way?  

1. Your Schedule Isn’t Effective

While social media certainly benefits from the image of spontaneity, that doesn’t mean to say that you need to take a freewheeling approach to it. Scheduling your posts allows you to map your marketing efforts in a way that works in conjunction with your overall business plan. If you’re just throwing up posts haphazardly, or just for special events, you’re likely to be missing your demographic’s attention. 

Check out the data from your account insights and consumer research, and identify the days and times that your target demographic tend to use social media. Plan to upload interesting and useful content at that time each week or every few days. If you haven’t already, create a social media content calendar, and produce your content in advance. 

This can be challenging when you don’t have a dedicated social media manager. However, there are tools that can help. Automated social media scheduler apps simplify the process by combining the content calendar, data analysis, and posting in one place. This means that you can upload your content to multiple accounts as per the schedule, and make agile changes, without having to do too much of the heavy lifting.  

2. You Don’t Understand the Platforms

There are a growing number of social media platforms. The mistake many businesses make is trying to simply treat them all in the same way. It can be tempting for the sake of time and resources to post exactly the same content across all of your channels. Taking this approach prevents you from capitalizing on the unique useful attributes of each.

It is better to understand how the specific design and intention of each platform differs and adjust your strategy to produce the most appropriate content for each. 

●      Twitter is designed for short, impactful messages. Make the most of the character limit with eye-catching, humorous language, and encourage interaction. Help followers to engage with your services by using a branded URL shortener — this keeps the content looking clean, on-voice, and less promotional.

●      Instagram is an image-based platform. While there is room for some text, it’s the artwork that is king here. Focus on telling the story of your content using just a single image that will draw the viewer to look at the text below rather than the other way around.

●      Facebook is best for longer-form content such as videos, blog posts, and even user-generated items. It’s still the most widely used social media platform, and as such there’s the opportunity for a reach across multiple generations.

●      Tik Tok is just starting to be utilized by businesses. Largely it’s useful to gain viral attention or to promote products via influencers. Think short content that creates an immediate emotional connection.  

3. You’re Prioritizing Metrics

We all know just how valuable data can be. It certainly has its uses in social media, and it can be tempting to shoot for impressive numbers when it comes to likes and follows. However, if you are strategizing just to meet these metrics, chances are you’re losing out on one of the most valuable things social media has to offer: meaningful relationships. 

Starting out, it can certainly be good to take a broad approach. By all means, use a bulk Twitter follow tool to make initial contact with your demographic. However, from there you have to start interacting with your customers in the way they appreciate via their social channels.

Don’t just post an image and hope for likes; ask a question that encourages feedback. Don’t make everything purely business-based, create content that shows you care about customers’  values. Most importantly, make certain that you engage in a dialogue with as many genuine commenters as possible. Retweet your customers’ posts about your services and give them a shout-out. This behavior helps you build a connection with customers that strengthens loyalty. 

4. Your Goals Are Too Generalized

A common problem when strategizing is failing to be specific enough. Many of us have fallen victim to starting our channels with very flimsy intentions — to get as many followers as possible, or to attract attention. Some of the most effective social media strategies are the result of being very targeted with our ambitions. 

A good example is a viral content. Most of us want our content to reach an audience of millions. Creating a video designed for brand exposure is relatively simple, but it needs to have a specific purpose beyond that. Once you get all those eyes on your content, what do you expect people to do? The accompanying text and follow-up posts need to lead your audience in the desired direction. Do you want them to interact with a specific service, or create a certain number of shares that improves customer acquisition?

Being specific about your goals and milestones, even down to a number of followers from a geographical area, helps you to design your approach more effectively. This also gives you better metrics to analyze, and adjust your tactics accordingly.   

Conclusion

Okay, chances are your social media strategy doesn’t suck entirely — but it could be better. Learn from these common mistakes, and make small but impactful changes. Don’t be afraid to try new things, and remember that social media is all about forging connections with your demographic.

What Social Media Monitoring Can Tell You About Your Business

If you want to be successful in today’s digital climate, it’s vital to be active on social media. From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, there are a number of major social platforms you can use to engage with your target demographic.

However, being active on social media isn’t enough. To maximize your success, you need to actively monitor social media activity too. By doing so, you can access key insights into your business, including:

1. Customer Opinion

Want to know what your customers really think? Head over to social media and find out. It’s easy to track mentions on every social media platform, so you can find out whether customers are impressed or disappointed with their latest brand experience.

As Deepak Agarwal maintains, these insights are extraordinarily useful when it comes to enhancing customer experiences. Knowing what customers are saying about your brand allows you to continually improve and social media gives you access to their opinions.

2. How to Engage with Your Market

As a business, learning more about your target market is critical to your success. By monitoring social media activity within your target demographic, you can determine the most effective ways to engage with your target audience.

Are the majority of your target market using Facebook or are they viewing Instagram stories? Do they spend more time on Pinterest or do they follow the trending topics on Twitter? When you know more about your target market, you can devise effective ways to successfully engage with them.

3. What’s Your Reach?

When you post original content, you need to know how far it’s going. Ideally, people will share your content, which will increase your reach and attract new users to your site. Unless you monitor social media, however, you won’t know what your reach is. Furthermore, you won’t know if your efforts to increase it are paying off. Once you start tracking social media performance, this data will be readily available to you any time you want to view it.

4. Who are Your Competitors?

Knowing who your competitors are – and what they’re doing – is essential if you want to outperform them. By monitoring your competitor’s social media activity, you can gain insights into their strategies and decide how you can offer your customers a better experience. In addition to this, you can determine whether your business is facing any new or unknown competitors. Which brands are your target market talking about and why? Find out now on social media!

Using Social Media for Commercial Success

If you want to leverage the power of social media and turn it into fiscal success, you’ll need to invest your time. Social media can be a great, low-cost marketing tool but, even with automated tools, you need to dedicate a reasonable amount of time to creating and sharing content, engaging with users, and monitoring interactions. However, the return on this investment can be astronomical, both in terms of income and reputation.

Increase your Social Media Following with This Nifty Guide

Social media is fast, free, and also very effective if you want to promote your business. That being said, if you want to promote your business to the best of your ability, then you need to make sure that you are doing everything you can to build your following. You also need to make sure that you put in the work to engage your audience too. If you don’t, then you may find that things don’t end up working in your favor and this is the last thing that you want. Take a look below to find out more.

Be Consistent and Regular

Part of your campaign's effectiveness depends on your ability to keep your name and your message in front of your customers. A post here and there will get lost amongst millions of other updates. For this reason, you need to be very consistent and you also need to be regular with your strategy as well. If you can make sure that this is the case, then you should be able to succeed with ease.

Speak to your Market

People really aren’t interested in knowing what you have had for breakfast if you’re not a food blogger. When it comes to your social media marketing campaign, you have to make sure that you keep your customers informed about anything that’s related to your business. You also need to make sure that you are putting in the effort to speak to your target market properly as this will help you to connect with your audience on a much deeper level. If you want to grow your market then why not look into Instagram Bot Follower?

Match and Format your Message

What works on Twitter might not work on LinkedIn or even Facebook. The types of messages that you do post should ultimately vary across your network. You might be able to post 15 times a day on Twitter and not bother anybody, but if you post this amount on Facebook or even on LinkedIn then this will make you look obnoxious to your audience, which is the last thing that you want.

Include Social Media Follower Buttons

It’s always a good idea for you to put some social media follower buttons on every single page on your site, as well as in your emails. Your social network may even allow links to other network profiles too. If you want to get the best result out of this, then it’s helpful to make sure that you include a link on every blog you post too.

Follow Influencers

If you are very knowledgeable about the people who work in your industry, then you should use this to your advantage. If you don’t know anyone in the industry then take advantage of resources such as BuzzSumo. This is a great way for you to try and find influencers who are in your area and when you follow them, you will then be able to share their content with your followers, and this can really work in your favor. You will get more views, and you may even find that your influencers end up sharing your content as well.

Tactics To Grow Your Business Without Much Hassle

Growing your business doesn’t have to turn into a nightmare. If it does, it means that you weren’t prepared enough or you didn’t know what you were doing, so things got out of control. You don’t want this to happen to you, but you’ve heard all about what you should do to grow your business, we have no doubt. Well, in this article, we’re going to be looking at the online side of things and how you can use this to grow your business also. Keep reading if you want to find out more.

Make Use Of Social Media

Social media is essential for any business normally, and when it comes time to expand, it’s going to be even more important. You get a far wider reach when you use social media than if you just stick to some of the other marketing methods. Social media is fast and effective at getting news or information out there for everyone to see, which is why it is so essential. Once you post your news, it is going to be liked and shared so quickly, which is exactly what you need. You will be able to figure out how much new demand there is or at least get a good idea. 

When you’re using social media, ensure that you are using all the main platforms. Don’t forget to post different types of content as well to keep it interesting. Nobody wants to see a block of text every time your company posts online, so change it up to keep people interested.

Host A Virtual Event

Have you ever thought about hosting a virtual event? With the pandemic going on right now, it’s not the best time to be hosting a physical event, but you still want people to know what’s going on. You want to celebrate, let your customers and business partners know about the expansion and any other information you think they should know. But, you’ve got to make it fun rather than like a business meeting, which is why you need something like a virtual photo booth to lighten the mood.

SEO

SEO is important for any business. It is what determines how well your website and pages do in the search engine results pages, and you don’t want to be past number one, really. If you want to grow your business, you are going to have to work on how visible you are. It’s not possible to gain more clients if nobody can find you. It might be the case that you don’t know a single thing about SEO, but luckily for you, there are experts you can hire to handle it for you.

We hope that you have found this article helpful and now see some of the tactics that you can use to grow your business without much hassle. All of these are based online, so this gives you an idea of what you can do on the internet to couple this with other offline tactics. Good luck.

How To Grow Your Business' Social Media Following

Jump back in time to even five years ago, and having a social media following wasn’t really anything to shout about. Fast-forward to the present day and suddenly the follower count on your social media channels is now an indicator of your brand’s success and reliability. With so much pressure on businesses to grow their followings online, and every competitor also trying to do the same thing, it’s no wonder that growing and maintaining a social media following as a business is a hard nut to crack - so here are some things that may help you. 

Focus on growing just one platform at first 

One of the reasons why social media can be tough for businesses is that there are so many platforms to choose from and it is near impossible to keep up with all of them. At the start of your social media journey, it is often best to focus your time, energy, and available resources on just one or two platforms, rather than trying to cover too many. To find your primary social media platform, do some research into your target market and find out who exactly your customers are and where they prefer to hang out. 

Determine your goals and have a strategy

If your goal is to grow your social media following, then define what this looks like to you and your organization so that you can create a social media strategy that complements it. If you’re struggling to determine what your goal should be or do not know how to create a social media strategy for your business, then you should try to sit down with a social media expert, such as someone from dappergoat.com. Even if you go on to create and post your content yourself without the help of an external agency, it is essential that you have an effective strategy in place first. 

Be consistent with your content 

Social media isn’t something that can be dropped in and out of - you need to be consistent if you want it to work. Through your customer research, you should have revealed some of the kinds of content that your target customers are currently engaging with and this can be used to craft your own content plan. Whatever kinds of content that you choose to post, you need to be posting at least once a day for most platforms, and even more for platforms such as Pinterest and Twitter. 

Don’t bombard your followers with a sales message

The best advertisements on social media are those that consumers do not realize are adverts. No one will want to follow your brand if you are constantly pushing sales-focused content, so be sure to create content that adds value to your consumers and to craft your adverts wisely. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a product launch or a sale every now and again, so long as they are interspersed within value-added pieces that people want to subscribe too. 

So there you have it - a few simple tips that should help you grow your social media following and to stand out from your competitors.