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More than half of the world uses social media, and the average daily usage time is 2 hours 39 minutes. So let’s start with the facts, your business needs a social media presence. No matter how small or large the company, it has become an insanely powerful tool within business marketing that simply cannot be ignored. Even if you’re proud of your “old school ways”.
Although social media alone isn’t enough to drive substantial business growth, it’s a hugely successful tool to add to your marketing strategies to connect with customers, increase awareness of your brand, and boost leads and sales.
Unfortunately, you can’t just post anything and everything. Stay away from the bad-quality blurry images that you took in a rush, and certainly don’t just copy someone else’s post. The hardest part of all of this is deciding on your strategy. You need a solid plan for engaging content to distribute via social media. This includes planning to generate topics, imagery and time managing when exactly the best time to post it to get the most engagement from your target audience.
Although this sounds time-consuming, it doesn’t have to be. You just need to decide what tone of voice you want to portray on your social media, which can often vary from platform to platform. For example, Instagram’s users are generally younger than Facebook's users, so you might want to save the memes for Instagram Stories and put informative posts on Facebook.
Yes, you read that correctly, you can use memes and GIFs - you can even swear if appropriate (depending on the nature of your business of course). In a world where we’re fighting for the user’s attention within an endless sea of social content, sometimes simple works best. We are bombarded with so much information online daily, so sometimes it’s as simple as if you can generate a laugh, you’ve created a positive customer relationship there that you didn’t have before.
Although the ‘less is more’ approach is great for the posts themselves, when it comes to how many and how often you post, you must be consistent to see results. With the frustrating algorithms that are out of our control pushing our posts out of people’s view, the way to tackle this is to post regularly. 3-7 times a week is considered the best practice. But remember, those posts must mean something to be worthwhile and not just a photograph you’ve just found in your phone gallery from weeks ago.
Following on closely from that, being authentic and honest with users is more important than ever. Especially with the larger pool of social media users being Gen Z, who will see straight through your fluffy content and won’t even bother to look. Brands need to show their voice and show authority, people will trust it and appreciate it. Whether your tone is funny or formal, humanise your brand. Followers want to see who’s behind the profiles and get a feel for the real brand personality.
Due to the skyrocketing success of TikTok over the pandemic, other platforms are following its lead and leaning more towards showing primarily video, so we must tweak our tactics too. Video is more engaging and generally performs better than still content. 100 million video hours are watched a day on Facebook alone. The best and easiest video content to introduce is short-form videos, which are short and snappy in 90 seconds or less. You can get more messaging across in a more dynamic way, which might bring those scrolling fingers to a halt. If your business is on social media and you aren’t posting videos, start doing it.
If all of this feels overwhelming, just take it one step at a time. Put some time and resources into your social media and you will see results. But don't be afraid to bend the rules a little and have some fun! The online world is very different to how it used to be, just take a look at how Aldi has generated so much brand awareness by upping their social media game, their engagement increased by 10,000% since their #freecuthbert campaign. Genius.
