Choose the right social networks for your business
With several popular social media platforms available and more on the rise it is important to focus on the networks from which your company will benefit most. Just because you use Facebook or Twitter for your personal choice does not mean everyone does. Your audience is diverse and its important to commit to more than one platform. At the same time, a business may not benefit from all forms of social media. You may find that Pinterest works better for your company instead of Instagram. That is why it is important to maintain social networks that can align well with your business.
Use trending hashtags
Hashtags are an easy way to boost social media performance. This simple addition to content can connect your posts to thousands of people who are interested in those subjects. Don’t get carried away though. Despite what your daughter may be currently doing, it’s not necessary to compose an entire Tweet with hashtags. Find out what is trending by using platform specific searches or hashtag search tools like all-hashtag.com and ritetag.com.
Schedule posts
Do not make the mistake of posting several times in one hour and then walking away for days or weeks. You may think more posts at one time is a good thing because it shows activity. With social media, however the goal is once a day, every day. If you are doing more than this you are fine just don’t go overboard. People use social media at different times and platforms have specific algorithms on how content is promoted. Scheduling posts daily and then reviewing their performance will give you insight about the best times to post for your industry. Tools like hootsuite.comand buffer.com allow you to schedule and track performance.
Contests
Encouraging interaction and growing followers is often best achieved through social contests. Its important to schedule this with enough time to achieve your goal. Don’t plan a contest for 24 hours to achieve 1,000 likes. Also, encourage existing followers, friends and connections to help share the contest and create relational buzz. Giveaways have been shown to be successful but be sure this is something that will attract potential clients. A give away for the 200th Facebook “like” means no one wants to be the 199th. Be sure to include the fact that a the winner will be randomly selected once they follow, share, comment or like your page. Also, run the campaign on each of your social networks individually and compare how they perform.
Be consistent
Often a business will interact with its social networks once a week and then complain about not seeing any activity or growth in performance. There are thousands of posts a day on multiple social platforms. Making several posts once a week (or less) will become lost to potential clients. Making a daily post across all of your social networks will consistently appear throughout these platforms and over time, create a stronger, organic growth for your business.
Monitor social platform and website performance
Once you have a few weeks of consistency, review your posts performance and compare that with your website traffic. Most social platforms provide basic data. Advanced tools will provide more detailed information. Google Analytics will provide insight to the popular posts that referred to your company’s website. Other tools like Shortstack can provide data specific to contest campaigns and individual posts.
Engage with followers by creating relationships
Consistently posting content to social networks means that you will start to see interaction from potential clients. Do not ignore these interactions. Reach out to users that like a post and encourage them to follow or connect with your business. All comments are a chance to boost social media performance. Even negative comments. Be timely and respond. This shows that you are available and interested in what people are saying.
Be original and entertaining
Overall it is important to be original. Funny posts gain more interaction and visual posts gain more traffic. Do not be afraid to put your company out there. More tools are becoming available that automate responses. Your followers are human and they want to create a relationship with a company of humans. Do not use general responses. Instead comment directly to the subject and encourage the conversation.
Moduet helps several organizations with their social networking and performance. Reach out to them on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram and let them know if you have any questions on how to boost social media performance for your company.
