4 Ways to Make Social Media Your Business’ Happy Place This Year
January 16, 2019
Social media is the advertising medium of modern man, so it makes sense that you keep these channels as up to date as possible. This can get hectic and overwhelming as your following grows, interactions multiply, and the amount of daily content intensifies. So, how do you stay on top of an ever-growing resource and maximize brand awareness through social media? Better yet, how do you make your brand stand out in a crowd of thousands of similar brands? We’ve compiled a list of 4 tips to help you better manage, maintain and market your brand through social media.
1. Get a Team Together: Ever hear the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child?” Well, it takes a group of like-minded colleagues to properly manage a social media channel. Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way, but the gist is that many hands make light work and you get less burn out trying to think of new content. By delegating various tasks to your social media team, you guarantee that posts come out on time, there’s always something fresh hitting the feed, and content is spelled correctly and accompanied by a flashy image or video clip.
For larger companies who have the money in their budgets for marketing management, you could outsource your social media channel to a third party. Working with a social media management firm doesn’t necessarily mean giving up your identity as a company online. Your firm will work with you to develop a flow that sounds natural and still reflects your brand accordingly. Then you can focus on more pressing matters like bringing home the bacon.
2. Personally Monitor your Account: Even if you delegate the posting to a team within your company or a third-party marketing firm, be sure to login and see what’s going on from time to time. As a business owner, it’s important to see what consumers are saying to you online, how comments and private messages are being managed, and what sort of content is being uploaded. This doesn’t need to take up too much precious time. In fact, once a month should do the trick, and knowing that you plan to login and checkup on things will keep whoever is managing things honest and on their toes.
By keeping tabs on what’s going well and what’s flopping with your followers you can make suggestions to your management team about what you’d like to see change. You might also choose to disband and hire a new team, depending on the success and traffic of your site.
3. Don’t Stretch Your Brand Too Thin: Yes, being on the major social media platforms is important to the success of a business these days. From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and LinkedIn, you want to dip a toe in every pool so you’re not missing any opportunities to shine. However, it’s also crucial to know the limits of your brand and not try to jump on every new social media craze that arrives on the scene.
There are new social developments surfacing all the time and some of them fizzle and fade away as quickly as they came. By investing company time and money into creating more and more profiles on these new platforms you risk ignoring what’s going on where you know the action is. In short, yes, you want to have more than one social media feed and have each one active and booming with content, but you don’t want to have too many obscure feeds that nobody sees and is only wasting resources to maintain.
4. Take a Chance from Time to Time: Nobody ever got ahead by playing it safe all the time. It’s one thing to be cautious with your brand, but to never explore options outside of the box could leave you far behind the competitors. One of the things about social media that makes it so difficult to get ahead is how many profiles, groups, and business pages there are for the same industry. Getting ahead and standing out has never been more difficult. Not only are you competing with 30 local brands, but thousands of national brands and tens of thousands of global brands.
Don’t be afraid to take a leap of faith from time to time and try something completely new to your brand. Hire a sketch artist to make a video of them sketching your best product in 10 minutes. Make a tagline contest for a new ad where consumers can type in ideas for the next marketing campaign and the winner receives the product for free. Take the live video feed option one step further and film a day in the life of a shoe designer, plumber, car mechanic, or whatever your profession happens to be. The current trends are popular for a reason, so pick one and roll with it.
To make your mark online you need your brand to shine and nobody knows your brand better than you. So, whether you choose to create an inside team, outsource to a third-party management firm, or take on the task yourself, be sure to always assert your brand vision, keep content fresh and engaging, and post on time. Once you’ve got followers on the roster, you need to have something for your followers to be following. Social media doesn’t have to be hard or scary, it can be your brand’s happy place for 2019 if you take the steps to get it there.