Gaining social media power to drive your business falls under the top goals brands have in today’s world. It has become inevitable to have social media presence no matter how small or big your business is. Perseverance and planning are the baby steps to build your profile and influence the sea of people present on social media. Studies prove that people mostly commonly use Facebook and other social media platforms for three most common reasons

  •  To stay connected with their friends and family.
  •  To stay informed and updated on the happenings and events around the world.
  •  To keep themselves entertained and busy in spare time.

Staying informed and updated applies to businesses and brands as well that are trying to build a network by connection with potential customers, influencers and clients. Hence, it is important to see what the customers’ inclinations are, what they want from you and how you can come up with a strategy that tackles all the needs of your buyers.

While building a business the first step is to outline the product and document your objectives. Convert the brand image and its ideology into its competitive advantage. Without having a unique selling proposition (USP), you cannot build an effective business on social media.

Involving your clients, potential customers, target audience and other stakeholders is very important for this step. If you are unable to understand their needs and wants and cater them, you are already failing at your business.

Learn about the demands of people and then compare it to what you are offering. Are they in line? Do they complement each other? Are you able to satisfy your customers and reach the set goal, side by side? If not, you need to go back and look at your vison. Review your business plan and find the loopholes and gaps between your initial outlined strategy, and your delivered performance.

You need to put extra time, effort and your proficient creative thinking in developing your business on social media. If this is not done right, it does not matter how much effort you put in for the rest of strategy, because having a clear understanding of what you are making, why you are doing it and how do you plan to deliver it is the backbone in building a business.

To accomplish your goals, you need to sit down and brainstorm in order to create an exceptional social media strategy that will not only build your brand but will also bring you more business, resulting in increased engagements from users, higher leads, sales and better revenues. Some of the power techniques that your business needs to get started and excel are listed below,

1.  Choose the primary social media platform: 

Knowing your audience and their favored social media platform for interaction and communication helps, you decide your primary marketing channel for social media.

Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube are among the top used social media platforms among clients, target audience and brands themselves.

Your product and customer research will help you decide which one of these you want to treat as primary marketing tools while keeping some of the others as secondary. Facebook even after more than a decade of its launch remains the most used social media website because of its interactive features, clear navigation and diverse user base. Companies prefer to build a following on Facebook pages and then try to mobilize that following across other platforms by linking the profiles.

Twitter is a fun way to interact on a more personal level or to give out free tips and one-liner suggestions throughout the day. LinkedIn works best when you are trying to build a professional network while Google-plus allows you to find people who might be interested in your business by joining the appropriate communities. Instagram works best for the brand s and products that focus on pictures and photo blogging, just like YouTube that allows video bloggers to publish content.

2.   Post quality content: 

Posting an update with the mere purpose of being present and active is a mistake most businesses make while using social media. What happens when you tell people to do the obvious or unimportant thing in your status? They see it, ignore it and move on. Is that how you want your business to be? Irrelevant and average? Of course the answer is no… so what can you do that will make people stop, appreciate and further spread your content. You focus on the quality.

It is not important that you are uploading only five or eight times a day, but posting valuable and share worthy content is. The content that is creative and original will make people read and share it further. Every post you make should be a representative of your brand image.

You can always be funny and humorous. One of the trends that attracted huge media attention was creating to deliver your message in a creative witty way, whenever you find appropriate.

Use visual content and infographics like tables, charts and illustrations; because graphics bring more views and people remember them easily. Look for the posts that performed good in the past and try to use that posting technique more.

3.   Schedule your posts:

If you are afraid that due to overload of work or other responsibilities, you might forget to post the content at right time, you can always buy automation softwares. Automations tools work best with social media websites and are highly customizable so you can work around them and convert them to meet your ideal situation.

Scheduling content keeps the audience engaged and interested, while you appear to be consistent. Scheduled tweets are usually made for after office hours or in the morning when people get up. Other times of the day when people are likely to check their social media accounts are lunch and dinnertime.

4.   Use your employees to advocate for the brand: 

Your employees are your greatest asset to build your business on social media. Ask them to post the content on your behalf from their own personal profiles. They can recommend the products to their friends, which increases the credibility and influence.

People trust their peers and weigh their opinions, so they are more likely to visit your website or share your content when asked by a personal connection compared to when asked from advertising.

5.   Connect with influencers to promote your business: 

Just like employees, influencers can turn your brand in to a success by just being affiliated to it. Find and build a connection with media personalities that can be linked to your brand and have a large number of following.

Instead of spending time to build a relationship with customers directly, you can use influencers to do it for you. Gaining a following and then keeping them takes time, but influencer marketing saves that trouble. This strategy not only saves time but also gets you increased attention and viewership from a diverse audience. The important thing is to influence the influencers and have a direct, personal and healthy relationship with them.

6.   Follow your competitors and their customers: 

You are trying to build your business on social media by getting followers and increasing engagements. What if you are unable to tackle that situation because your competitor has better brand presence and authority over its costumers on social media compared to you. To understand your own lacking and ways to improve it, you need to look at your competitor’s social media strategy. Keep your focus on points like

  • What makes your customer happy.
  • What are they doing different.
  • How you can modify your strategy without appearing as a copycat.

Apart from following your competitors and monitoring their performance, one of the most direct way to get your audience’s attention is by making them feel important. Retweet or quote them whenever they post about you. If the review is bad, do not be afraid to hide but use it to appear strong and ask for their opinions and how they would like to do it. Find people who are mentioning you on their social media profiles by customization search and follow or like their posts.

7.   Email marketing: 

One of the oldest tricks in promotion and advertising industry is email marketing. Companies and organizations use it to get subscribers and build a connection on more personal level compared to mass media marketing on social media platforms.

It has come a long way and still stands as an extremely useful technique to grow your community. With the help of analytics and automation tools, you can easily segment the people and their preferences, building email lists that are not only particular but tap directly into your niche audience’s interests.

Smarter emails lead to high return on investment and better traffic for your websites.

Social media is a platform to connect with people and stay informed. These are also the basic two requirements for a business so when developing a social media strategy, keep it creative and interesting. Pay attention to people and connecting with them. Initiate two-way interactive campaigns that keep the audience talking, and constantly update them with content and useful information related t your business.

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