Are you getting everything you want from social content?
Or is it becoming one big time suck?
Social media marketing has become a powerful way to get your business and products in front of a huge audience—but only IF you know how to optimize your social content.
To avoid leaving value on the table, you’ve got to start with a strong foundation and continuously optimize your efforts. You’ve got to set achievable business goals and use them as your guide in every campaign.
How do you do that? Let’s dive in.
1. Know Your Audience
Most businesses jump into social media to avoid being left out. They don’t take time to set their strategy first.
Big mistake!
One of the most critical first steps in social media marketing is to understand your audience at an intimate level. Take time to build buyer personas so you can visualize who you’re talking to, instead of primarily focusing on what you’re saying.
A good buyer persona addresses general demographics, such as age, gender, and location, as well as more specific interest-based features like what they do in their spare time, what excites them, what shows they watch, etc.
For example, let’s say we’re launching an eCommerce site for men’s suits called ManlyManSuits. An example of an audience persona is Doug, a 32-year-old man who works as a business analyst in Charlotte, North Carolina. Doug is married with two young children, makes $120,000 per year, and is interested in James Bond movies, Bloomberg, and the occasional Cohiba cigar.
Where do you find this level of detail? Here are 3 strategies to get started:
- Facebook Audience Insights: This powerful tool allows people to view the audience demographics of their own page or that of similar/competitive pages in a simple and easy-to-understand user interface. You can see everything, from the simple demographics like age and gender distribution to what other pages and interests a specific audience has.
- Utilize user forum communities: Reddit, for example, has subreddits in virtually any topic. By visiting these subreddits, you can see what people in your niche are talking about, how they communicate, and the types of posts they respond to best.
- Talk to them: Chances are you have someone in your target audience within your own network. Setting up a quick 15-minute chat over the phone can be incredibly insightful and help you to piece together a much clearer picture of your target audience.
2. Know Your Platform
Every social media platform is different. Don’t fall into the trap of reusing content across platforms. That’s a shortcut that leads to nowhere.
Facebook is great for curated content and videos. Facebook’s algorithm changes have made it hard to get away with shallow, low-engagement content. It’s important that your Facebook posts are primed for interaction and visibility.
Twitter is the spot for quick-hits, news, blog posts, and GIFS. Although Twitter limits your posts to just 140–280 characters, this constraint can be liberating. Twitter is made for real-time posts that encourage engagement. It’s also a great way to enter any conversation, and, as long as you can find a way to add value and do so unobtrusively, your audience will respond favorably.
Instagram is for stories, quotes, high-quality photos, and the occasional high-quality product image. Instagram is a great platform to add some personality to your overall social media portfolio and appeal to your audience’s more visual side.
LinkedIn has become a very useful platform for posting more professional content, jobs, and company news. This might not be a good fit for many companies for the sake of getting clients, but it can be a great way to connect with other potential partners, mentors, or future employees who can help grow your business in the future.
Google+: Google+ may not be the shining star of social media platforms, but if your audience spends time there, it’s worth being active on it. As a bonus, blog posts on Google+ generally get decent exposure on Google as well.
Snapchat: Snapchat is great for showing the personality of your business at a more intimate day-to-day level. Showcase your team or show off your products, particularly if there’s something unique about the way they’re made.
3. Outline Your Goals
The key to optimizing your social content is to know exactly what you want to achieve. Do you want to focus on retention or acquisition? Do you want to drive some quick short-term sales for a new product, or do you want to build your brand for the long-term?
Need help setting your strategy? Read this post.
For every post, you should be able to answer a few questions:
What do I want to achieve with this post? This picture of our team wearing Halloween costumes will help our audience see the personality of our team, and this will help humanize our brand.
Who do I want to reach? I want to reach people who have already purchased something from us at least once.
How does this connect with my overall social media strategy? This will prime our audience for our upcoming promotion: get a free bag of candy with each order before Halloween.
Does this help build my brand? Yes, our image has our logo on it and the written copy is in line with our messaging.
4. Give, Give, Give
Many businesses make the mistake of only sharing promotional content to generate sales. This might work for a few short-term hits, but it will ultimately make your platform less effective, and it may end up costing you more time and money.
Today, social media algorithms take a page’s engagement rates into account when determining the reach and exposure for its posts. For example, if you’re running a Facebook page and constantly posting content aimed at getting people to click to your site, you may see a spike in site traffic, but, over time, you will likely see fewer and fewer people interacting with your actual Facebook posts.
When that happens, every post you make will automatically be shown to fewer people, and your natural engagement will continue to drop. So, when it comes time to push important content, you will only be seen by a fraction of your intended audience.
Alternatively, you can mix up your social media content with posts that are primed for growth and engagement. Give people what they want—anything from free resources to witty and timely posts to occasional, quirky, on-brand images.
By mixing it up, you’ll likely get more engagement. Then, when you want to post something that drives revenue, your page will already be primed for engagement, thanks to your prior engagement-focused posts.
5. Test, Test, Test
No excuses. To get results, you must watch your metrics and use them to improve your advertising campaigns.
It’s standard practice to test a handful of different ads at the beginning to gauge cost-per-click, reach, and engagement, and then to pick and improve the winners and scrap or improve the losers.
The key here is to focus on improving each ad.
Each post you make shouldn’t be disregarded the moment it loses engagement. You should be able to open up a spreadsheet or Facebook Ad Manager and track the results of each ad. This will help you improve the next batch, integrating what you’ve identified as the winning qualities and avoiding the losing ones.
For a simple process to optimize your content, read this post.
Final Thoughts + Bonus Tip
Your social media content should feel like an incredibly involved data-based science project. Each post you make is a mini-hypothesis tied to your grand hypothesis that you can use social media to better your business (hint: you can).
Then comes the execution. You need to be ruthless in your oversight to make sure you are putting the right message in front of your exact demographic.
Bonus Tip: To really knock your social media out of the park, build some engagement into your brand. Whenever you post something, be sure to respond to anyone commenting and find ways to provide value.
Sometimes a comment on one of your posts could receive more likes than the post itself. These responses also help to break the barrier between business and consumer, helping you position your business as human and accessible.
Finally, you must be able to either validate or reject your original hypothesis, and then take what you learned and apply it to your next batch of social media content.
Good luck!
About the Author: Ronald Dod is Cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer of Visiture.com, a search marketing agency focused on SEO for eCommerce businesses. He helps professionals navigate the SEO landscape to put together a plan to increase new qualified traffic and conversions. Follow him @Visiture_Search
