Why is a social media presence so important?

Because it gives your brand recognition, visibility, and marketing benefits. It will also help expand your client base through social selling.

Below, we’ve compiled a list of 10 social media secrets to help you advance in your online journey.

FACEBOOK BUSINESS MANAGER/META BUSINESS SUITE

Managing your business activity on Facebook through your own personal account – the one you use to post pictures of your kids and share memes – is inconvenient. It creates a blur between your personal life and work identity.

This can be especially problematic when you are part of more than one venture, want to collaborate with others, or want to help others with advertising on Facebook platforms. Logging in from a client’s account, or creating a separate profile for work, can jeopardize your account security and is frowned upon by Facebook.

Facebook Business Manager (which is slowly transitioning into Meta Business Suite) helps you manage Facebook ads, accounts, and pages more productively, which can help make you a better marketer. It’s also ideal for agencies that manage clients’ social media accounts or ad accounts. Set up your Meta Business Suite account. If you’re lost, stop and give us a call. We’ve done this a few times!

PLATFORM CHOICE

Facebook is the largest social media network in the world, with its 2 billion monthly users; however, it may not be the best platform for your business. Older consumers have a tendency to be active on platforms like Facebook, while the fastest growing social networks are TikTok and Instagram.

If you have a B2B business, then LinkedIn will most likely be the most effective social media platform for you to use, while e-commerce businesses and retailers might find that Pinterest is successful for them.

CROSS-PROMOTION

We’ve talked about using the right channels, so now let’s talk about using multiple channels!

Social media cross-promotion is an essential step toward increasing the reach of the content, generating more touch-points for clients and prospects, and attracting more potential customers to products and services. The idea of social media cross-promotion is to share your content, as widely and efficiently as possible, across multiple social networks. Cross-promotion means you tailor your social messages for each channel.

A social media cross-promotion strategy helps you maximize the specific characteristics and strengths of each network and community.

OFF-SCHEDULE POSTING

Many business owners schedule and queue up an entire month’s worth of content in advance. That is a good idea as having a schedule makes the social experience more consistent and professional for your audience. But you shouldn’t be shackled to this schedule.

New articles and ideas will pop up on your radar all the time. Maybe something interesting happened in your industry this week. Maybe you just snapped a great photo of your team at the office. Give yourself the chance to actually share content during opportunities like these rather than hoarding it all until next month. If you set aside, say, an hour each week to make time for unscheduled postings, then you can round out your existing content and make your page feel more organic.

POST MOMENTUM

Viral posts are awesome! Even some of your ordinary posts with nice engagement are nice, just be sure you’re not moving things along too quickly. Give your posts time to breathe and to grow in engagement.

If you post something in the morning and then post something different in the afternoon, you are effectively halting momentum on the first post. Facebook will begin to deliver it in the feed less and less. If your new post goes over well, Facebook may stop delivering the old post entirely. Just be sure you’re ready to move on when it’s time for the next post.

CLOSED CAPTIONS

Do you post videos to social media platforms? Good!

Now it’s important that you used closed captions. Not only does this help make your account more accessible, but it can also improve your viewing figures. This is due to the fact that most people scroll through social media with the volume turned down. Most likely they’ll skip over videos that aren’t captioned and won’t know what’s going on.

Thankfully, many apps are now incorporating automatic captioning features into their software. But you can always caption it manually after recording.

NEGATIVE FEEDBACK RESPONSE

Responding to negative reviews really can be beneficial. Many businesses ignore negative feedback or even delete bad comments. This will only make customers more frustrated and reflect poorly on you. Your response rate is important.

Remember, you don’t reply to negative reviews to placate one person – your entire audience watches that exchange, so you’re actually demonstrating your values and professionalism under pressure to hundreds or even thousands of other social media users.

CONTENT PROMOTION

Promoting content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can be highly affordable. More importantly, it can grow your audience beyond people who already follow and interact with your pages.

Start experimenting with promoting certain posts and using custom audience-building features. Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook even offer the ability to target specific companies or hyper-local areas.

If you put just a small budget behind a few key posts a month, then you can quickly multiply the number of people who see your messages. You also generate valuable data based on who does and doesn’t interact when they see certain posts.

HASHTAGS

Even if you post amazing pictures that show your business embracing life to its fullest, you still have work to do!

Social media posting isn’t just about the artistic side. There is a bit of science that goes into getting your posts seen. It’s time to embrace hashtags. Hashtags are used by people who are looking for specific things on social media. If someone wants to just see images of dogs, for example, they search #dogs. Then all sorts of dogs will fill their feed.

Consider keeping a list of hashtags that are appropriate for your business. Some influencers keep their hashtags list in their notes on their phone. That makes it easier to copy and paste into any app. Use relevant and specific hashtags, but when it comes to Instagram, consider broad hashtags. One of the best ways to create a passive Instagram following is to use broad hashtags on your Instagram stories.

Learn how to build engagement using hashtags from one of our previous blog posts!

QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

Another advantage social media has is its access to sheer volumes of data — you’ll be able to probe deeply into user behavior, patterns of interaction, and demographic information.

But unfortunately, data can’t tell you everything.

It can’t give you qualitative insights into how individuals feel toward your brand, or feel about specific interactions. It can’t help you generate new ideas you haven’t tried before. It can’t even give you actionable insights unless you’re asking the right questions of your data in the first place.

A lot of people think that simply curating a few good posts on social media will get them thousands of followers. But the truth is, it won’t. What we’ve found that works the best, is putting in a little more effort – being human.

CONCLUSION

Are you ready to expand social media reach and engagement for your company? The key to social media success is providing consistent, quality content and then utilizing a strategy that will help get that content in front of others. This means using every tool available to you to get in front of an audience.

We’re hoping the secrets listed here will help you think outside the box. If social media content planning makes you feel overwhelmed, you’re not alone. Just give us a call at (217) 222-1451 and we can arrange to walk you through what will work best for you.

Together we will make a plan for success!