Today, 69 percent of Australians are on social media and 57% are accessing those networks every day or most days. If your business is not leveraging social media as part of your online marketing, you are falling behind your competitors. Nonetheless, once you are utilising social media marketing, it is necessary to optimise your activity. It is essential your strategies work.
A social media marketing plan requires the use of best practices that will increase brand awareness, attract prospects, and nurture existing relationships. There is no magic behind this. You simply need to incorporate tools and systems that will assist you in strategy development.
Social Media Best Practices
1. Develop Buyer Personas Using Demographics
Do you know your regular and frequent customers? In business, these are the vital few, the roughly 20 percent of your customers responsible for 80 percent of sales. Buyer personas are fictional characters based on these people, your ideal customer. You then develop your content and social media marketing around the wants and needs of these individuals. When you create content that is valuable to your vital few, there is a higher likelihood of engagement.
2. Know Where Your Customers Are
The reality is, social media marketing is time-consuming. Moreover, attempting to maintain too many platforms can have a negative impact on your effectiveness. Therefore, use the insights gleaned from your buyer personas to understand your ideal customer’s online activity. Identify those social media networks that are the best for your brand, products, or services. Attracting quality traffic to your website relies on marketing targeting your ideal customer.
3. Monitor Your Competitors
The way you differentiate yourself from the competition is being more valuable. When you monitor competition, you will discover what is working for them and what is not. A study found that 32 percent of social media users expect companies to respond to inquiries in 30 minutes or less. Another 42 percent expect a response in less than 60 minutes. Therefore, you will create more positive interactions and exposure when you meet and exceed expectations.
4. Balance Quality and Quantity
Most companies seek to build the largest social media audience as possible, casting a wide net and worrying about relevance later. However, many experts will say it is better to have 100 active followers than 10,000 who do not engage. Both of these ideas miss the mark. No matter how relevant the following, you can never have 100% of your followers actively engaged 100 percent of the time. However, you can expect to have a rotating 20 percent engaged at all times. Therefore, the goal is to grow the largest but targeted following as possible.
If you would like to talk about social media best practices to grow your business, or just need more information, please contact us.
