How to Take Your Social Media Strategy to the Next Level
Social media marketing is something that almost every brand and marketer is doing these days. Due to this, there is a lot of competition and it is really difficult to stand out in the crowd.
When consumers are being bombarded with marketing and branded content on all platforms, how do you make sure that your content gets noticed?
The key is to formulate an effective social media strategy by incorporating all social media marketing trends and best practices.
Here are some top tactics and best practices that can help you take your social media strategy to the next level.
1. Use Social Listening
The real beauty of social media is that it enables you to have two-way conversations with your audience instead of just pushing marketing messages at them.
And, social listening lets you do just that. You can use social listening to understand user sentiment about your brand and to find out what people are saying about your brand and products. This lets you know how well your social media marketing initiatives are being received.
Moreover, you can also join in on some of these conversations about your brand to further engage with your audience. Thus, it is a great way to have two-way conversations with your audience, get feedback, and improve your existing strategies.
You can use any of the numerous social media listening tools like Mention and Brandwatch. Most of these social media monitoring tools provide not just social listening, but also detailed analytics, which solves two purposes.
2. Really Connect With Your Audience Using Personalization
Adding to the point above, you don’t just need to have conversations with your audience. You also need to personalize those conversations and interactions.
Consumers expect brands to deliver exactly what they want. And, on social media, they want to see only relevant content that is personally tailored for them.
With technologies like machine learning, brands can now actually learn from their past interactions and personalize their messaging. This helps brands develop much better connections with their audiences and those connections pay off.
According to a study by CEB, B2B marketers are 60% more likely to buy from a brand that they feel a connection with. In fact, they might even pay more to buy from brands that they connect with, even if cheaper alternatives are available.
So, personalize your social media messaging and customer interactions as much as you can to connect with your audience better.
No social media strategy is complete without hashtags. They are the most powerful weapon in any social media marketers arsenal.
Hashtags work on almost all social media platforms and provide a lot of benefits that can help you take your social media marketing to the next level.
Here are some of the key benefits of using hashtags:
- They help you reach and target a more relevant audience, who are already interested in the topic or niche. This is akin to qualified lead generation in a sales funnel but from a social media marketing perspective.
- It will also enhance your content’s reach because, otherwise, it is only shown to people who follow you. But, if you use hashtags, your content will also be shown to the people who follow that hashtag. More often than not, the latter is a much larger audience.
- Create a campaign specific hashtag can help you track the performance of your campaign and see all of the posts using the hashtag in one place. Also, these are also instrumental in promoting a specific campaign and enhancing its reach.
- You can also create a brand hashtag and encourage your audience to use that when tagging your brand. This will help you keep track of all of your mentions on social media.
Now that we have established that hashtags are useful, let’s take a look at some of the best practices that you should follow while using hashtags.
- Select the most relevant hashtags for each post, instead of using a fixed set of hashtags for all of your content.
- Don’t just use the most followed hashtags, use a good mix of hashtags with different follower counts.
- Don’t use too many hashtags as that might be detrimental to the engagement that you get. In fact, according to a study, using more than 10 hashtags reduces engagement for Instagram posts.
Use these best practices to leverage hashtags to take your social media strategy to the next level.
4. Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing and social media marketing go hand in hand. And together, they form a powerful marketing combo. Anything that you do on social media can be enhanced multifold by leveraging influencers.
When you run a contest or offer, influencers can help promote it to a much broader audience. Ans you post content to spread brand awareness and create a positive brand image, influencers can do that by simply writing a positive review.
Overall, influencer marketing can help you achieve almost all of your marketing goals with much greater efficiency. So, whatever your social media marketing goals and strategies are, you can easily integrate influencer marketing with them.
The key, however, is to find the right influencers. For that, you can use an influencer search tool like Influence.co to find influencers by category, location, or follower count. Also, don’t forget to vet your influencers properly and only work with the ones who can best represent your brand.
5. Rethink Your Content Strategy to Include a Good Content Mix
Social media provides a plethora of options when it comes to content formats. From traditional social media posts to the latest IGTV videos and previews, there’s a lot that you can experiment with.
Given that there are so many ways that you can reach your target audience, it would be a shame if you didn’t utilize these and try different types of social media content. Moreover, different types of content are good for different purposes and can help you meet specific objectives.
You can, for example, leverage your Instagram posts to create a consistent feed that acts as your digital shop or portfolio. You can use Stories to promote your latest posts or bring attention to an ongoing offer. At the same time, you can post a series of IGTV videos, posted on the same day every week like a series, to drive audience engagement.
And those are just the things that you can do on one platform, by using different content formats for different purposes. Imagine what you can achieve if you applied a similar strategy across several social media platforms.
Use each social media platform and content format to work in tandem to meet a set of objectives, all at once. Now, that’s what we call smart marketing.
6. Track and Measure Your Social Media Performance
No matter how good your social media strategy is, there is always scope for improvement. But, for that, you need to know how you are currently doing, what is working well, and what isn’t. That’s why it’s important to track and measure your social media performance.
You can do that by using a third-party social media analytics tool or simply the built-in analytics feature of various social media platforms. This will help you gain insights into your overall social media performance and also the performance of each content piece.
You can also use UTM tracking links to get more detailed insights into the social media traffic and exactly how much traffic is coming from which initiative. To generate UTM codes for your social media content, you can use a code generator like Google URL Builder.
Conclusion
Having a solid social media strategy is the first step if you want to be successful at social media marketing. Use these tips to formulate a successful social media strategy and ace your social media marketing game.
