Major brands on social media and influencers make social media marketing look easier than it is.
What could be easier than creating a social media account, making a few posts, and exploding your brand overnight, right?
But of course, it’s just not that simple or easy at all. With billions of users and a veritable ocean of content to compete with, businesses need to strengthen their social media presence to make any kind of impact.
In this post, we’ll break down how you can create a solid presence on social media in 2021.
As you build your profile and create content, you’ll see better engagement, more social media followers, and an overall boost in your brand image. Let’s dive in!
Be present on all the relevant platforms
Do you feel like you can’t catch up with the many different platforms available online? That’s understandable because not only are there global platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there are also niche communities on Reddit, YouTube, Nextdoor and other networks.
It is worthwhile to make the effort to identify and be active on as many relevant platforms as you can. You want to especially do your research on networks that are specific to your industry or audience. One major reason to do this is to have ownership of your brand’s narrative in as many places as possible.
The more profiles you have, the more difficult it will be to consistently create quality content for each platform. Even so, being present is important since you’ll have more control over your brand image and content that appears in relation to it.
Complete your profile
A simple but impactful mistake that businesses can make is to not complete their social media profiles.
Very often, the ‘About’ section or the ‘Description’ area of a Facebook business page is given very little thought while the company focuses on content in its feed.
You need to maximize and optimize every area of your profile that you can.
Remember to do the following:
- Add pictures to your profile image and header. Use your logo, add text to your header image to provide information
- Fill in your contact information completely
- Add detailed information in the About or Description sections and use keywords that people may use to find your business
- Provide details like working hours, services provided, and more
- Connect your pages and groups with each other
The details you provide on social media impact your SEO performance. They also help social media algorithms to understand what your profile is about, and help people find your business and reinforce your brand image.
Tweak your content for each platform
All social networks aim to engage people and foster communication. However, each one is different to the point where content that works on one platform will be invisible on another.
Every social network uses algorithms to display content to people. While we won’t know exactly what works, there are brands and individuals who have figured out the best types of content that work on specific networks.
You need to do some research on each platform and come up with the right type of content for each one.
For example, did you know that LinkedIn prioritizes text posts where the phrasing is short, emotional, and has a strong opening hook? There’s even a formula for LinkedIn posts that you can start using to see a boost in your post engagement.
Focus on visual content
The key to social media is remembering that it is largely a visual-driven platform. People aren’t going to carefully read every post they come across. They quickly scroll through their feed until a post does a good job of catching their eye in the split-second’s attention they’re given.
Stay on top of the visual aspect of your content by doing the following:
- Create image-based posts regularly
- Post video content by uploading video files to the platform itself. You can also share links from YouTube to other platforms
- Make use of ‘Stories’, ‘Reels’ and similar short video formats on different social media platforms
- Host live video sessions where you answer questions, stream an event, or otherwise engage with people
By studying your engagement stats and data, you’ll see that your visual content will create the most impact. And videos perform especially well.
Post. Every. Single. Day
For typical content marketing, posting something daily is unfeasible and even detrimental. Sending an email blast every day could lead to losing some of your subscribers. And you might also get penalized by email providers. Similarly, if you’re creating your own blog content, posting high-quality posts daily won’t be easy.
But on social media, where attention spans are short and people expect fresh and new content, creating content virtually every day is critical to be relevant and get more eyeballs.
This doesn’t mean that low-quality content is acceptable.
What you need to do is create a content calendar for your social media posts. You also need a marketing calendar to make sure that you create special campaigns for different events like Black Friday, New Year’s Eve, and other holidays.