As you may very well know, social media isn’t always easy to handle when it comes to marketing your business. You’ve read article after article on how to succeed and maintain relevancy in the social media world, but it can be hard to keep up with the ever-changing platforms. What follows are seven social media tricks everyone struggles with from time to time and how you can do them right to improve your strategy and rock your social media efforts.
1. Not Showing Any Personality
It’s simple: People like personality. We love when a brand shows its personality on social media (especially when brands banter with other brands). It’s a fun and engaging way for followers to get a taste of your brand and its culture.
Showing your personality can also attract your ideal target audience, which just might persuade them to convert into customers later on down the road.
2. Not Promoting Your Posts
There’s a lot of debate on the benefits of advertising on social media. However, it’s becoming increasingly popular as social networks continually enhance their advertising elements.
When it comes to advertising on social media, you want to keep one thing in mind: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. That means adapting to the nuances of each platform to get the most bang for your buck.
Social media ads perform best when they get noticed without disrupting the user’s experience. For example, Instagram ads perform well when they’re beautifully styled photos — not sales heavy graphics. Twitter ads perform significantly better when you utilize hashtags and images. Understanding and adapting to these differences will significantly improve your social media advertising efforts.
3. Not Engaging with Followers
Social media is by its very nature social. It’s meant to foster interactions and build relationships, which is exactly what you should do with your followers. Simple things like responding to comments and liking posts you’re featured in shows that you’re available and willing to engage with your followers.
It’s also essential to respond to comments because social media is often where people go to voice issues they have with your product or service. Responding to these concerns shows you care about your customers and are willing to do whatever it takes to retain their loyalty.
4. Not Focusing On Other Channels
Social media is a reliable way to raise brand awareness and engage with your customers. Many will tell you it’s the only way to go. But it won’t ever be the be-all end-all of advertising for your business.
Your marketing efforts should be diverse and include social media, not be exclusively social media related. It’s is a small piece of the marketing pie and you’ll waste your effort and your dollars if your strategy relies solely on social media marketing.
5. Not Self-Promoting
There’s no denying that you entered the social media world to promote your business. There’s also no denying that some people self-promote too much, which can result in unfollows.
When deciding what kind of content to promote via social media, you want to follow the rule of thirds. In this strategy, one third of your content should be shared content from industry leaders, one third should come from personal interactions with your followers and one third should consist of promoting your business and generating profit.
6. Not Analyzing Posts
If you’re determining a campaign’s success based on how many likes or shares it gets, you’re doing it wrong. There’s much more you need to take into account when it comes to determining a social media campaign’s performance like impressions, profile visits, mentions, clicks and the list goes on. Luckily, there are an abundance of free and affordable tools out there to help you in this area.
7. Not Focusing On Your Target
Blandly trying to appeal to everyone never got a business anywhere. It’s important to know who is your target audience, as well as when and where to find them on social media.
It’s going to take some research but you want to make sure you intimately know your audience and the kind of content they’re interested in. This will allow you to give them exactly what they want at the most opportune time, which will eventually have a big payoff.
Keeping these seven tricks in mind will have a huge impact on your social media efforts. Once you get in the habit of sticking to them, you’ll have a solid strategy and will be succeeding on those tricky social media platforms in no time.
This article originally appeared on Inc.com.
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