25 Sep The Secret to Social Media Success

Effective marketing includes finding the right channels to deliver messages to your target audience. Not all platforms and channels are the same when it comes to the individuals who use them, how content is shared and engaged with on the platform, and whether or not the platform is simply a good fit for your business. This is especially true for social media.

Despite its popularity, social media marketing isn’t magic. If you only set up social media accounts and leave them idle, you can’t expect to see great results. Social media marketing is hard strategic work, and each social media platform requires even more nuanced strategy and understanding.

There are countless ways to improve your social media strategy and find success, but there are three key secrets that any social media marketer can adapt for every platform. These secrets include defining what success actually looks like to you, knowing your audience, and prioritizing quality over quantity. Read along with us as we discuss these secrets in greater detail!

Start by Defining What Success Is

In a previous blog post — “Social Media Mistakes to Avoid” — we discussed how not measuring your success is one of the biggest social media marketing mistakes you can make. We introduced the importance of implementing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-sensitive) goals. So, what kind of success should you be measuring when it comes to your social media performance? This will be different for every business, brand and social media marketer.

Ask yourself: What does success mean to you? No matter your answer, it’s easier to find measurable success on social media when you set clear goals from the very beginning.

Consider some of these common goals for defining success on social media:

• Boost web traffic — Social media can boost your web traffic if you create content that directly directs or encourages users to visit your website for more information or to engage with your products and services. Increasing your website traffic with social media is accomplished by making your social media platforms and your website a resource that your target audience values and can visit again and again for more helpful, informative or entertaining content. This can lead to a strong brand authority and improved customer trust.
• Grow sales — Along with increasing your web traffic, you can use social media to specifically drive up sales on your website by promoting your products or services. On social media, you need to do more than just post pictures and product information. You have to really sell the benefits and the lifestyle of what your brand offers. This is known as “social selling,” and it can be very effective. You can track this success by comparing your social media campaigns directly against your sales data to see if there are any correlations.
• Gain new email sign-ups — Social media can also help improve your other digital marketing efforts, including email newsletters. Use your social media platforms to discuss the exclusive content your email newsletters provide, while still giving them a sneak peek through your social media posts of the content they can expect in the newsletter. Email marketing is a great way to engage with your existing loyal customers, while social media helps you engage with your customers on all levels and attract new ones.
• Provide better customer service — Customer service has become more public, and social media is the perfect platform to highlight your commitment to providing the best customer service. Openly and empathetically engage with your customers’ concerns, take the time to praise your employees who provided great customer service, share positive customer reviews and more! Results you can track from your customer service efforts include customer loyalty and positive feedback online.

 

After you’ve set some clear goals and ways you plan to measure your success on social media, you then need to really understand your customers.

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is the next important social media marketing secret. While this crucial step may initially seem obvious, it’s often overlooked. If you don’t truly know and understand your target audience, you won’t be able to choose the right social media platforms or create engaging content.

When starting out on social media, you can get an early boost of followers by encouraging your friends, family and existing customers to follow your business accounts. At the start, you’ll know who your audience is — but how do you grow? This requires doing research on your target audience and using social listening techniques to discover who they are in terms of demographics, what their interests and values are, how they prefer to use social media, and what types of content they prefer to engage with. Your target audience may also differ on each social media platform depending on which members of your target audience use which platforms and how they use them. Just as you should create a buyer persona of the average or ideal customer who would purchase your products and services, you will also need to do the same for social media.

Once you know who your audience is and who you’re presenting your social media content to, you can make more engaging content that will boost your business goals and objectives!

Quality Over Quantity

Finally, how do you create more engaging content? By prioritizing quality over quantity. While posting content often and on a consistent basis is helpful for gaining favor with social media algorithms and for staying relevant with your audience, simply posting more often doesn’t automatically bring greater success. What matters more is posting high-quality content for your audience, even if it means posting on a less frequent basis.

Your business likely might not need to post multiple times per day or even every single day. Posting frequently but with content that doesn’t meet your audience’s needs, interests or expectations can actually harm your social media presence in the long run. Too many posts that seem random, irrelevant or offer no value can come across as spammy. When this happens, your audience won’t engage with your content at all, and your posts will become excluded from being seen on social media due to social media algorithm preferences for content that users have engaged with. Engagement metrics indicate to social media platforms that your content provides value to your audience.

Use what you learned about your audience to create quality content that resonates with them, and consider creating a content calendar to help create varied content and a schedule for posting on a regular basis.

The Biggest Secret: Seek Out Social Media Marketing Experts

Using social media for your personal accounts is very different from social media marketing for your business. And when you’re busy running your business, you likely don’t have the time or resources needed to fully dedicate to a social media marketing strategy. That’s why many businesses with a successful social media presence have another secret: seeking out the assistance of social media marketing experts!

If you’re looking to improve the social media presence of your business online or to simply get started with social media in the first place, our social media marketing experts from Virtual Stacks Systems UK are ready to help. We have the skill, experience and knowledge to set clear goals, define your target audience, choose the right social media platforms, create high-quality engaging content and manage your overall social media presence. Contact us today to get started!