7 Essential Tactics to Grow Your Business With Social Media
When you use social media for your business, there are a ton of rules you must follow.
At least if you want great results.
Those rules can be divided into helpful tactics, and essential tactics.
Helpful tactics are those that help you generate better results and grow your page, such as interacting with your audience.
Essential tactics, on the other hand, are the things you need to do in order to succeed on social. If you skip doing them, you’ll be slowed down in the process, and you’ll have a hard time reaching your goals.
One may say that essential tactics are the things that lay the foundation to a successful social media presence, and that helpful tactics work as jet fuel to boost your results.
In this article, I am listing 7 essential tactics you need to use in order to succeed with your business on social media.
10 Essential Tactics to Grow Your Business With Social Media
1. Know your audience
If you’d ask me what the single most important tactic of social media is, I’d say this.
That’s also why I put it as number one.
Knowing your audience and who you are going to target is essential for social media success. If you don’t know who your target audience is, you’ll shoot in the blind and most likely miss. When you know your buyer persona, you’ll be able to find them much easier on social media, because you will have defined what their passions are, and therefore making it clear where you should look for them.
If you don’t know your audience, there’s a big risk you’ll waste your effort. Maybe you’ll engage with people who couldn’t care less about your industry, and hope that they’ll follow you.
Well, sorry to tell you, but if they aren’t interested in your industry, they probably aren’t going to follow you or interact with your page.
Not only will you be able to find your audience when you know what defines them, but you’ll also be able to create content that appeals to them. When you are playing in the smaller leagues, most often you have to go out and hunt for your audience, but if you share content that appeals to your target audience, you might just be able to attract the people instead.
Skittles knows their target audience and speaks to their followers in a ay that resonates with them.
2. Develop a strategy
To achieve any big goal, you need a rock-solid plan. Your social media strategy will work as a map that guides you to where you want to go, and it will also tell you how you are going to get there. If you expect to find a treasure without a map, you’ll have to struggle for quite some time.
The same goes for a social media strategy. Many neglect a strategy due to the fact that it sounds silly, and “they already know everything in their head”, but the truth is that a well-developed strategy will let you achieve your goals quicker, and make sure you stay on track at all times. If you aren’t on track, you can take a second look at your strategy to figure out if you need to turn around or if the road you’ve taken to your destination works just as well.
Now, I won’t list a complete guide to creating a strategy, because we’d be here all day, however, what I will do is leave you with a link to a guide that teaches you how to future proof your social media marketing strategy, and talk about the foundations that make up a successful one.
To help you get started, here are some important questions to ask:
- What are your goals?
- What is your timeframe?
- How will you get there?
- What budget do you have?
- How much time will you invest in social media?
3. Remember quality over quantity
When you see guides across the internet on how you manage social media, many of them say that you should post at least once a day, sometimes even 2-5 times a day. That’s a lot of posts, and imagine if you have 3 or 4 social platforms. That’s 20 posts a day!
Not only that it is stressful having to post every hour, the most difficult part lies in the content creating.
Unless you have great resources that help you with content creating; 20 posts is completely impossible.
In fact, even if you only need one or two posts a day, it might be impossible.
However, what happens when the resources of content creating runs out, but the need for content remains?
Most often, the quality is decreasing so that the brand can keep up with the high pace.
This is of course not a recipe for success.
Yes it is true that at least one post a day will be most beneficial for you in terms of tech and growth, but the problem is if that post is a low-quality post, because in that case, it won’t do much good for you.
All social media platforms are content-driven. They rely on you sharing content. That’s the only way to reach success. You can’t skip the part where you upload content and then wait for success.
It won’t happen!
Related: How to create appealing visual content for social media.
The bottom line?
Yes, you’ll see best results if you post at least once daily, but if the quality of your content decreases only because your are trying to keep up with the pace, it won’t be the most beneficial for you.
It is better to post more seldom and share mind-blowing content than to share every day and post average and below average content.
4. Provide value
Social media is about providing value.
With your content as well as your captions, profile, comments, and interactions.
The most important part of your social media content is that it provides value.
If you look at every single post that has gone viral over the years, you’ll se that they have something in common. They all provide value?
But what is really value?
Value is anything that “gives” something to your audience. Value doesn’t have to be cold-hard cash as some people tend to believe – but it can be. Most often is not.
Value with your content is anything that makes the viewer feel like they got something from it.
It can be anything from knowledge, to information, and even something so simple as a laugh!
As a brand on social, you don’t need to decide on “one type” of value you want to provide on social, but most often, successful pages are mainly focusing on one or two values.
Just look at @fun_bestvids.
They are mainly focused on one value proposition and that’s making their followers laugh.
Making your audience laugh is highly valuable, because it will make them come back for more and have a positive memory of you.
The best part is that when your content provides value, people are more eager to share that value with their friends, thus tagging them, and giving more traction and spread for your post.
5. Follow people in your industry-look at your competitors
People who are in the same industry as you, also known as competitors (depending how you look at it) can teach you a lot about social media.
Therefore, it would be stupid to ignore them, instead of learning from them, and implementing their successful social media strategies.
When you follow industry leaders – in your own industry, you can be sure that these people know what they are up to.
These people are where you want to be, and following their footsteps will eventually take you there as well!
Looking at your competitors will tell you a lot. Here are some of the most important questions you can get answers to:
Are your target audience to be found on social media?
If your competitors are seeing success on the social media platform they are using, it’s probably because their target audience is to be found there. Considering the fact that their target audience is almost identical to yours (otherwise they wouldn’t be your competitors) it means that you should also be able to target and reach them.
Which platforms should you use?
Not all social media platforms are equal, and not all platforms are suitable for your brand. Your target audience might prefer Facebook instead of Instagram, for example, and in that case, it’s important that you are prioritising Facebook rather than Instagram. By looking at what social platforms your target competitors are using, you can get an idea on where your audience is to be found.
What content resonates well with your audience?
Knowing this is a tricky one, because it demands a lot of experimenting on your own to find out. However, considering the fact that your competitors has already been doing it for quite some time, you can piggyback off of their knowledge about content and see what type of content they are sharing that gets the best results.
You and your competitor’s audience is highly similar, so if they like a certain type of post from them, chances are, you’ll generate great results with that type of posts as well.
How often should you post?
Last but not least: How often should you post? Different audiences want different numbers of posts from you. In some industries, people only want to see one post a week, others might want to see three posts a day. By looking at a few of your competitors and how often they are sharing posts, you can get an idea of what your industry is like.
6. Build relationships
It’s called social media for a reason. You’re supposed to be social!
When you interact with people in your industry, such as influencers and other passionate individuals, you build great relationships with them. When you’ve built relationships, you’ll be able to help each other out in a ton of different ways.
The bottom line is that you need to make contacts, and use them!
When you interact with people, you also get their eyes opened for your brand. A simple kind comment might be all it takes to get them to follow you.
The same should go for your customers and followers. When your followers comment on your post, show them that you are sincerely thankful for their kind words. The more you interact with them, the better your relation will become, and the better customer retention you’ll have.
When you’ve built awesome relationships with them, some will even be so stoked on your brand that they’ll promote it completely for free!
7. Don’t overly promote
You are using social media for marketing purposes. I get it.
But do you really get better marketing results by sharing more marketing posts?
Many brands tend to believe so, and are trying to milk out every single drop of marketing power social media has to offer.
However, the truth is that you actually generate better marketing results by promoting less.
Sounds weird, right?
Well, it’s true!
The thing is that when you share ad after ad on social media, people will eventually get tired. Some might unfollow you, others might start ignoring your posts, and others might become a hater of your brand.
The key to successful marketing on social media is balance, and this brings us back to point number 4: provide value.
The rule that is most often talked about regarding social media and marketing is the 80/20 rule. This means that you should post 80% non-promotive content, content that provides value. And then 20% promotional content. Remember that promotional content can provide value, too!
Just because it’s an ad, there’s no reason to why you should make it boring.
When you find a balance between promotional content and non-promotional content, you’ll soon be able to see that you’ll actually generate better results with your ads because more people will listen to them rather than just ignore them.
Conclusion
When working with social media, there is a lot to think about.
Strategy, content, competitors, and much more. To succeed with your marketing efforts, it is important that you follow the basic and essential parts of a successful social media marketing. Without a stable foundation, you can’t continue building.
Learn to build the foundation, then continue building your structure.
