Everyone’s using it nowadays and it’s a great channel to gather leads, nurture prospects, and offer updates to your customers. Can you guess what it is?

It is social media, which has slowly, but surely made its way into our lives. Can you even remember a moment in time in which social media was not used? Taking small and shy steps has gotten to the point in which it became quite an essential part of our lives.

Whether you use it to communicate with your friends or family via a messenger service or to promote your business, it is there in one form or another. Not to mention, it has gotten easier than ever to use social media for efficient communication. This also implies growing your brand.

Social media incorporates a number of platforms, which all have different uses. And they are ever-changing, this involving design details and even functionality related ones.

You may ask yourself what are the benefits if you’re on your “A” game on social media. We can tell you right off the bat that it’s not just about being eye-catching. After all, you don’t want to get your 15 minutes of fame and be forgotten. This is why you need this simple, yet effective “how-to” guide. So you can get your game going strong right from the beginning.

Without any further ado, this is what you need to do to create a strong social media presence:

1. Put together a strategy

Like with many other things in life, not having a strategy may produce a chaotic trajectory, which might not be what you want for your business. And social media has become more than just a place where you post every now and then for the sake of having something on your feed. If you are a business owner or if you just want to share your thoughts, you need to figure out your goals and how to project them towards your targeted audience.

By figuring out your goals, you figure out the best tactical set-up. And that is where your target audience comes into place. And you can take into consideration any of these aspects:

• What’s their demographic profile? And here we can talk about anything from age to gender, education, or even location. You wouldn’t be advertising back pain lotions to a really young crowd, right?
  
• What are their interests? Is it posts about a specific subject, is it reviews, is it something that you can provide and catch their attention?
  
• Why do they turn towards this type of content? Do they just want to be up to date with certain trends, do they want to grow from a personal or professional perspective or do they just want some video to play in the background while they are busy doing something else?
  
• And… how do they consume the content? Videos, reels, articles, polls? You cannot entertain them if you provide videos when they might just want to read what is being presented there.

Here’s an example of a Buyer Persona profile for Emma the Executive that offers a clear overview of internal and external motivations of the ideal customer.

Depending on your specific goals, there can be more questions asked, in order to better determine what exactly needs to be done. But take these as a general template for a better understanding of your page’s goals.

2. Choose your platform(s)

There might be hundreds of social media platforms out there and joining all of them might become overwhelming and chaotic. Social media helps increase exposure, but knowing which platform to use and how to operate it gives you a better opportunity to use it to its full potential.

This is why you need to choose your platforms accordingly, depending again on your audience and your “wow factor”.

Do you like editing videos more than writing articles? Do you manage to express more through a 1-minute video rather than a maybe 5 minute read? Youtube might be a good fit, as well as Instagram or Facebook. It might also be worth mentioning the fact that the advertising on these platforms can be user-customized, so that might also help you keep your A-game going. All mentioned platforms reach millions of users and it is important to keep in mind that competition might become rather fierce in terms of exposure.

Could it also be that you have that kind of “I can express myself in a few words and make it memorable” kind of thing going on? Or is it that you have breaking news or some sort of important announcement and you need that factor of urgency? Then Twitter might end up being your lucky winner. Twitter users are usually looking for content that is text-based, but the platform also supports images.

Of course, you can choose to not limit yourself to only one, two, three, four…teen platforms, but it is important to keep in mind that you will have to concentrate on all of them and provide content on each of them.

The good news is that you no longer have to do it all manually. That’s why there are several social media management tools that can help you share content on all your profiles from one place.

3. When to post on social media

Time is for posting what the golden hour is for selfies. And choosing the best time to share a post brings it more visibility than posting at random times. The best part about this is that you do not need anything else except your audience: their behavior will give you all the hints that you need in order to figure out exactly when you should be posting.

What you have to keep in mind is that it is all going to depend on what you have to promote: if we are talking news, you might want to “always be on the watch and move”, in order to always deliver the newest stories to your audience. And in this situation, there might not be a recipe for the perfect posting hour: you break the news as it appears, be it at 5 in the morning or 11 at night.

If your content is designated for people who work a 9-5 job, you might want to post either early in the morning or later during the evening, which is basically their commute times. Lunch breaks could also be considered in this situation.

4. Your followers are important

It can be agreed that pages where you can only notice one or two posts are not necessarily the ones you go back to. Let’s imagine the following: you have to choose between two pages, one that has a lot of followers, good reviews, and quite a few posts and one that has maybe less than 100 followers, no reviews, and some scattered posts from the previous year. Are you going to trust and choose the business that has proven results or are you going to give a chance to the other business?

Stepping up your game and having engaging content and an active social media presence can influence people to come back and not ignore your page. And National Geographic knows that and has put it to good use: the nature magazine has 150 million followers on Instagram. Since Instagram is a visual platform, National Geographic put this to good use and got successful: their remarkable photos have been reaching millions of people and they will continue to do so in the future.

Social media is all about establishing connections with the audience, through customer-centered content. This can involve replying to different comments and messages as soon as possible and responding to both positive and negative comments, as this will also help build trust. It can also involve encouraging the user to show their satisfaction through reviews or different campaigns that concentrates on their experiences.

Conclusion

Social media has become a powerful instrument in the last few years. Having just the strategy in mind without taking into consideration other aspects is not enough, so hopefully, these tricks will help you figure out exactly what you have to do.

Being on your social media A-game will take a lot of connecting with the audience and knowing all these pieces of information will save you a lot of time and will keep you at a distance from “finding the needle in a haystack” strategies. Which is exactly what you need in order to leave all competitors behind.

About the author

Ovi Negrean is the co-founder and CEO of SocialBee. He helps startups, small businesses, freelancers, and agencies build their brand awareness, reach more customers, and establish a stronger digital presence through social media management, content writing, ads management, and more.

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ovidiunegrean/
Twitter Profile: https://twitter.com/OviNegrean