Gone are the days when people, businesses and corporations relied solely on traditional media and advertising to get their message to the people. Those methods have proved to have a limited reach, and don’t allow for relationships to be built with people. Today, marketing focuses on creating a dialogue, as well as having a brand, an image, that people can relate to.
This is why many people, companies and corporations have turned to social media to maintain their success, reach new audiences and grow. It has become incredibly important, and this shows in the fact that companies that don’t have a social media present, don’t grow.
Not only is having a social media presence important for the longevity of your company, it can drive traffic to your website or online store, grow brand awareness and improve relationships with your customers or fans. Here are a few ways in which to boost your social media presence.
Know your audience
One thing that you don’t want to be when it comes to social media, is a jack of all trades, but the master of none. You have probably seen those accounts; the ones that go from posting content related to business and political satire, to celebrity memes. This is because they have most likely not found their audience, or don’t know them.
Knowing your audience is crucial, because it means knowing what voice you should use. It might sound counterproductive, because usually you should have a voice first and then the audience will follow, but sometimes the voice develops afterwards.
The tone that you use and content that you generate should be the same across all social media channels, because this creates familiarity with your followers, and more importantly, builds trust and loyalty.
Use hashtags
One of the easiest ways to ensure that your voice and message is being heard is by using hashtags. The allure of randomly selecting the most popular hashtags, and using them for every single post might be strong, and it might work in the short-term, but what you want is longevity. Using the most popular hashtags will certainly expand your reach, because it means that more people will be exposed to what you are posting, but that doesn’t mean that they will follow you.
Instead, using hashtags that directly relate to each post will guarantee that the message is heard by the right people, which is also why knowing your audience is so important. However, it can take a lot of time to think of many hashtags for each individual, which is why it is best to have help.
Thankfully there are tools for that purpose, such as Task Ant. Task Ant was voted number 1 in Influencive’s 11 best hashtag generator tools. The tool will provide suggestions for the most popular hashtags, that receive the most engagement, for whatever the topic is for your post, as well as allowing you to save sets of hashtags to easily copy and paste for the next post.
Followers are great, relationships are better
One of the biggest misconceptions about social media is that having the most followers is great for any channel or account, however the reality is slightly different. When it comes to most social media platforms, one of the determining factors related to how visible you are is the level of engagement you receive.
There are many ways to improve the relationship you have with your followers, and as a result, increase the engagement that you receive. For example, you could reply to a comment that a follower left on your latest post or you could even like a few posts of theirs. Not only does this leave a good impression, but that positive interaction could have far reaching benefits; such as your followers mentioning you in their posts, which further increases your reach and discoverability, as well as conversion rate.
Another way to do this, especially for Twitter, is using a Twesocial, an organic Twitter marketing service. Twesocial will ask you a few questions about the audience you are wanting to attract, then a team will manage your account, using the content that you provide. More than this, they will increase your exposure by targeting and engaging similar accounts, which means that you will be creating natural relationships.