Social media networks are a great place to market your goods and services. They have such a huge following that they are becoming some of the largest marketplace on earth. Take Facebook for instance. At the end of 2016, it could boast of 1.86 billion active users. Instagram, on the other hand, had 600 million users while Twitter had more than 300 million.
Tapping into such a large market is every entrepreneur’s dream. The first step, however, is to have a social media presence. It allows you to reach out to and engage with both existing and potential clients. As the level of engagement increases, your client base follows suit. How then do you boost your social media presence?
1) Have Clear Goals and Objectives
Before entering the social media arena, make sure you know what your goals and objectives are. For instance, who is your target audience? What do you hope to achieve? How do you achieve it? How you answer these particular questions determines your social media strategy. This then determines how successful your media presence is.
2) Focus on Content
A common mistake in social media marketing is to go for the hard sell at the expense of content. Granted, your primary purpose is to promote your brand. However, keep in mind that your target audience wants meaningful, informative, and engaging content.
How do you strike a balance between the two? It is easy. The key is to follow the 80/20 rule where only twenty per cent of your posts are promotional. The remaining eighty per cent must focus strictly on content. This means providing links, tips, suggestions and relevant information, but with your brand tied to them.
3) Get Personal
Even as you focus on content, take care not to sound too formal. Social media is about forming relationships, and you need to relate with your followers in a personal tone. In a recent Entrepreneur.com article, Tai Lopez, a social media influencer, gave suggestions on how this can be done.
He recommended creating what he called a ‘brand story’. This means giving a history of your life, product, service, or business. It also means understanding the needs of your clients and having your brand respond accordingly. Only by doing so can you gain their trust, and ultimately, their loyalty to your brand.
4) Use Visual Media
Great goals, content, and an engaging brand story are great, but are they enough? Not if they are not visual. Until recently, you could get away with simply telling social media users what you were about. Today, they expect you to use visual media to pass your message across. Who can blame them? Visual media is more engaging than plain text.
This shift from ‘tell’ to ‘show’ has even led to the growth of image-based networks such as Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest. Two of these networks – Snapchat and Instagram – now have more active users than Twitter.
The shift to visual content has also led to the rise of video content. Tai Lopez claims that only one medium supersedes Instagram and Snapchat stories – YouTube, and he is right. As far as social media presence is concerned, video truly is king.
Conclusion
Social media is the next marketing frontier. With close to two billion people on Facebook alone, it is easy to see why everyone is rushing to cash in on what is the opportunity of a lifetime. If you are one of them, start by improving your social media presence. This entails having clear social media goals and objectives. It also means having valuable and shareable content that users will appreciate. That said, the content should preferably be personal and visual if you want to make the maximum impact.
