The marketing world is constantly evolving, and consumers are so much more empowered than ever before. You need to consider that your potential customers often do their research before deciding whether or not to do business with you. And, whether you like it or not, not everything that they read about you online is curated and shared by you. That’s right, your customers are on social media platforms discussing you too.

Whether you are offering a service or selling a product, online consumers want to see what real people have to say about your brand. They want to explore their options and see if it’s worth their time and money.

If you want to have success in social media, it’s essential to review your use of social media. Think about what social channels your brand is present on and what your overall business goals are.

What Social Media Channels Are Best Suited For Your Brand

The first step in the review process should be to determine which platforms are worth your time and which are not. Here are five simple ways to make this determination:

• What platforms your audience actively use: Find out which social platforms your audience actively engages on. You can do this by creating a poll; send an email link to your database, offer a giveaway for participation, and post the survey on social channels.
• What social channels align with your content: Consider the type of content that you share and pair that with the most relevant channels. For instance; video is best on Youtube, Periscope, and Vimeo.
• What channels are relevant to your industry: If you’re struggling to determine which channels are best for your business, research your competitors and see what’s working for them. 
• Are your objectives and channels aligned with your audience: When you try to speak to everyone, you connect with no one. Rather, you should keep your specific audience in mind, and your strategy should be to connect with them. In other words, curate your content around your audience.
• Make sure you understand the “buyer journey”: The process of how the consumer arrives at your digital door and makes a purchase is more complex than ever before. You need to do research and gain a deep understanding of the consumer struggle. It’s all about determining the specific needs of your audience, offering solutions, nurturing consumers through the decision-making process, building trust and rapport, and becoming an invaluable resource.  

Optimize Your Social Channels

As we’ve already mentioned, it’s all about connecting with your audience. You need to develop a strategy that is personalized to their needs and interests. It’s all about encouraging them to engage with your content. 

This means that you need to optimize each platform to offer that custom experience. You can start by testing your content on each channel. Then, put together a plan to obtain actionable data. 

Here Are A Few Ways To Optimize Your Social Media Content:

•  Test visuals – determine any outliers
• Test one thing at a time, i.e. Images, text, calls to action, video
•  Test your content frequency vs length
•  Test different types of content

Identify Specific Goals

Have you got clear and specific objectives? Are you tracking results and measuring success? One of the most important factors is understanding what metrics are essential to your business. Ultimately, how you can track and measure your success.

Here Are Three Key Ways To Identify Social Media Goals:

• Review old content. Take a look back at old content that you shared over the last year. Check how well it performed and how it can be improved.
• Refine what it is that you want to accomplish. Do you want to increase awareness? Have an engaged audience? Build trust and rapport? It’s essential to ensure that your team all understand the key objectives and work to support those goals.
• Put it into action. It’s no good just talking about your goals. You need to put plans and processes in place to achieve these goals.

Develop A Content Strategy

It’s all about content management. Keep in mind that your audience is already overwhelmed by content from other brands, so it’s important to make yours easy to access. Content is how you connect with your audience and the best way to make them engage with your brand. 

Visual marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools in social media. Content that includes an image has been shown to get over 94% more views. And don’t forget about videos. After reviewing your past social media performance, put together a strategy that includes a good mix of both images and video. 

The review will help you to determine what works best for your brand and what really gets consumers talking. It’s not an instant process and will require some trial and error. But over time you will find what works for you and areas that you can improve in. 

If you are new to the world of digital marketing, go check out this recent article about the Best Email Marketing Strategies For Beginners.