With more than 2.31 billion active social media users worldwide and 97 percent of consumers between 18 and 34 use online reviews to gauge the performance, trustworthiness and the performance of local businesses. You have to find the right techniques to press to make social media your cash cow.
Unfortunately, you aren’t the only one looking at these numbers and looking for ways of making their strategy the winning strategy.
What does this mean? You cannot go about bombarding your customers on social media with sales messages consistently. Even with a target audience, your social media boost will come from building a relationship and trust with your audience. The best way for you to do that is by engaging the existing and potential customers with high-quality content. You should make the engagement inclusive by asking your clients for their opinions.
That sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but, by the time you have a huge audience you can rely on, you will need to invest significantly. As a business that has recognized the importance of social media and its potential for generating sales, you will need to be patient growing your audience. Having a huge following on social media isn’t an overnight success.
Here are some of the most effective strategies you can employ for a social media boost:
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Discover the social media platform that will work for your business.
For some unclear reason, everyone taking their business online makes Facebook their first stop. While Facebook is the biggest social media platform, followed by Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest, these big five aren’t always the best fit; at least not for all businesses.
The success of your e-commerce project relies on your ability to find the right social media platform – that is, the site with the highest conversion rate because it has users visiting through social links.
Here is what you should do – research and analyze the social media sites where your customers are talking about your products/ services, brand, industry, as well as your competitors. After monitoring some discussions, you will see what people are thinking.
By analyzing your competitors and mapping out social media networks for your target audience, you will be able to select the best platform to market on.
How should you start? Get the right social media monitoring tools to help you in tracking, listening, and engaging with your current and your potential customers. The main tools include:
Ahrefs Content Explorer: to find out about the platform used by your competitors, use this tool. With it, you enter the domain of your competitor and hit search. You will get results of the competitor’s social media activity.
BuzzSumo: to collect social media insights from your competitors, use this monitoring tool. All you need is your competitor’s domain or the industry’s keyword. With it, you will find the popular content shared using that keyword.
Mention: Mention is the social media monitoring tool you use when you want content published by businesses but not posted on their sites. Using the tool, you will get information on the mentions the businesses get.
By monitoring what is happening around, you get to track your audience’s engagement plus their growth across different social networks. With time and effort spent analyzing trends, you will know what to invest in for the highest returns on your investment.
Once you have the necessary information about the site, you can create related content that is higher quality!
You never know, your business may do better on YouTube and Pinterest rather than Facebook!
Why go through all this trouble?
- It will increase your business’ organic reach.
- Spend less promoting your posts on social media in the long run.
- You can easily establish social proof using the number of followers, comments, and likes.
- Have a better chance of turning friends of your followers into your followers!
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Make use of Existing Social media networks in a Unique Manner
If you note that the best way for your business to generate sales using social media is by tapping into the top five, then you have to make your business’s marketing strategy stand out. There could be many other people selling what you are selling! To position yourself for success, you will have to try and use social media a little different then what everyone else is doing.
Instagram, for example, offers different ways for you to post images such as the horizontal media profile gallery. For that needed social media boost, try using different layouts to create hype about your campaign. As you’ll soon learn, there are many ways of using a social media platform, but you have to identify a unique way of exploiting the platform for it to work in your favor.
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Make use of Emojis to Boost Engagement on Social Media
Emojis have come a long way but, they have finally been accepted as part of the new online vocabulary. Some people are able to communicate effectively using emojis alone. As per Emojipedia, as at June 2017, the total number of emojis in the Unicode Standard is 2,666.
The use of emojis to amplify organic engagements on social media is proving effective, and it is also lowering marketing costs when used appropriately.
The success of emojis in marketing comes from the fact that emojis go beyond by humanizing brands and capturing more attention. Therefore, they convey general emotions and ideas around posts even before your target audience reads the post. So, for more eyeballs, greater attention and a boost in your social media reach, sprinkle some emojis in there!
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Your Audience is looking for a Sense of Belonging – Get Them Involved
When running a marketing campaign, like launching a new product, let your audience be part of the fun! If there is an emoji that communicates to your brand, or you just happen to have an emoji specific to your products, ask your audience to use the emoji. You can also have a hashtag for them to use. This could be a great promotional campaign, and you can throw in giveaways to excite your audience and to increase the reach of your campaign.
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Stay Active and use The Right Hashtags
Some businesses have attained unparalleled social media boost from their creative use of trending news and hashtags. Most ongoing conversations on social media are because of hashtags. If you want to know what is happening in your town and across the world, you should consider looking for hashtags that are trending.
If the hashtag is relevant to your brand, then you can join in on the events and conversations. How do you find relevant and trending hashtags? Find a tool that will guide you. One of the best tools for finding hashtags is Hootsuite. With Hootsuite, you can find trending hashtags which you can like, reply to, and retweet.
The other tool you can use is Hashtagify. This tool lets you find hashtags that are related to the ones you are targeting.
Here is something you should be aware of though, treat hashtags differently on different platforms. This is because trending hashtags will affect engagements differently on said platforms. For example, Facebook posts are better off without hashtags while tweets with single hashtags get significantly high engagements. Instagram posts lie in between.
Keep in mind that hashtags will only work if, instead of hijacking them, you contribute to the conversations around the hashtags in a meaningful manner.
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Pin to Profile Well Performing Posts
What is the first thing people see when they visit your social media? Does the post on top of your page inspire confidence? Keeping these in mind is important because every time you engage on others, the people you engage with don’t stop there. They take a step further and look through your site. Keep a keen eye on your social profile as you build your online presence.
Your profile on your site should be stand-alone marketing channels which should communicate what you like and also what your funnel will click on. Therefore, besides strategically pinning a post with a high reach and the best pictures on top, you should update your page’s cover photo. Your cover photo should be eye catchy to promote sales.
Other than the cover photo, try including internal links back to your page or site on your profile or bio.
So, instead of burying that post that did well on your previous campaign, you should show it off by putting it at the doorstep – in this case, at the top of your profile.
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Use Trending Topics and Memes for a Social Media Boost
Why rack your brains to come up with the right social media posts when you can ride on trending topics to keep your posts relevant? By spending a little time researching, you will come across social media trends which are relevant to your business.
While at the trending topics, why not capitalize the viral memes? Memes have taken over social media and the world at large, and anyone who can create a meme is looking to make theirs the best meme ever created!
At the moment, memes are considered cultural behaviors spreading from one person to the next thanks to imitation. So, to give your business that virality, use memes.
Note that memes don’t have to make sense at first because their success depends on their cultural relevance, proper timing and how fast they can be replicated. If you wish to create a meme for your business, make use of the Meme Generator.
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Go Live
With Facebook Live, Twitter’s Live option, Instagram Live and Snapchat, you can make it possible for your audience to experience your business’s event as they happen live. Through these live options, your audience gets to share their own experiences. You can also encourage them to follow you online by announcing the live broadcast in advance. Your audience can also participate by sharing their thoughts on the event, they can ask questions, and they can also vote. This way, your audience feels as though they are part of your business.
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Set up contests and Give Special Discounts to Your Followers
No one ever wants to miss an opportunity to save money on a purchase especially when the only thing expected from them is their creative thoughts on why they should win the discount. By directly giving offers to your customers, you improve your reach, have fun, engage better, and you deepen your bond with your customers.
To get the contest up and running, you may ask your customers to ‘Pin It’ on Pinterest, do creative 140-character stories on Twitter, post best picture on Instagram or post on a page on Facebook. These are just some of the options you can try when creating contests. You can also ask your followers to use specific hashtags to enter into the contests.
Contests are effective social media boost elements as they don’t just increase your social media reach but they guarantee you, new followers.
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“Tag That Friend Who…..”
Haven’t we all seen this going around? Perhaps you have been tagged in several yourself! Have you considered using this phrase to build your business? Well, the mentality behind this phrase is the simple fact that we’ve all come across posts that leave us thinking ‘that could be me’, or ‘I know someone who should see this’. Since the post speaks to you and is relatable to several people, it will get shared across different social media platforms. This will boost your business’s visibility in the process.
To make this work for you, make sure you highlight the character/ habit of your persona in a light/ positive note. You can also poke at a friend’s character or invite that person who wouldn’t mind a challenge.
This strategy is effective because it contributes comments to the posts and it will increase your social media reach.
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Don’t compromise on the Quality of your Content
Content is King and you shouldn’t post poor quality content just to appear active. To stand out, you have to create exceptional content. Good content guarantee repeat readers and customers.
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Keep Posts Humane, Educating and Entertaining
While your audience loves reading, liking, and sharing your posts, they hate it when you respond with less candor or when it is clear that the responses are automatic.
First, your content must be something your audience will want to read about. Also, you should show your sense of humor and whenever possible, use slangs. This way, you sell your content educationally and entertainingly while showing that there is a human being behind the brand.
You need to find a way of making your social media platform a magnet for your audience. If you can get your audience to refresh your page for fear of missing out, then you are doing it right.
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Simplify the Checkout Process
Your audience on social media doesn’t like complicate marketing. For a social media boost and more sales, have a simple checkout or purchase process.
Ensure you have a Buy Now button on your social media pages. If a product’s purchasing journey is short, you will get more recommendations. So, if your page asks a lot from customers in the form of multiple clicks and searches, then, you are losing many potential customers.
Make your site easy to navigate and keep your social copy direct while making use of strong CTAs (Call-to-Action)
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Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
A mobile-optimized website is likely to increase reach and followers because digital marking has more mobile users than desktop users. So, your customers must have a simple and fluid experience on your social media platform.
Besides optimization, you will also need to consider your site’s loading speeds. If you aren’t sure of how fast your site loads, you should consider getting Google’s PageSpeed Tools. The tools will give you insights on the speed of your page on a desktop and a mobile device. You will also receive tips on how to increase your pages’ loading speeds. This tool also lets you run mobile friendly tests on your website as well.
You should also optimize your photos by prioritizing on visual content rather than CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
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Guide Your Buyers Using CTA’s (call-to-action)
Other than simplicity and speed, make a clear outline of what you are selling and the purchase process. Use a working call-to-action where you let your customers make a decision based on what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when. When setting up a page, use buttons such as Learn More, About Us, or Register Here.
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Do your Customers Leave Reviews?
To gain new followers and to build brand loyalty, ask your past clients to leave their reviews. According to research by Pew Research Center, more than 40 percent of adult consumers in the US go through online reviews before making purchases.
You can learn more about what people are saying about your brand by tracking conversations where your brand gets mentioned. Ensure that you capture and react to positive and negative comments professionally. Monitoring conversations also make it possible for you to salvage your business, get new leads, identify your customer’s pain points, reward your brands advocates, get creative marketing techniques, gauge motivations, track online sentiments, and more.
You may also ask your customers to share their purchasing journey, or you can provide incentives for people to leave comments on your page’s reviews section.
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Messaging Apps Can Improve Your Customer Support
It is worth mentioning that poor customer service delivery will kill your business. If you are looking for a social media boost, then you should use Messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp. These apps offer a better opportunity for you to connect with your customer. These apps offer 24/7 availability hence their effectiveness.
According to Search Engine Journal, top messaging apps have more than 2 billion monthly users.
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Influencers and Guest Bloggers
To make your site appear authoritative and to attract more followers, have someone with a large online presence endorse your products/ services. The use of influencers is big on Instagram, and you may want to use one for the much needed social media boost. Influences already have huge followings so, by endorsing you, their followers will follow you and buy your products/ services.
You may also get guest bloggers to write for your blog. You can tag the bloggers, and you should also promote their blogs.
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Build professional profiles
It is important that your CEO or other top-level executives have a professional and a marketable online presence. Some clients look up the face behind the business even before checking out products. So, you should update your LinkedIn profile frequently highlighting what you do and your current business news.
Conclusion
At the moment, there are 3.42 billion internet users with 2.31 billion active on social media. This is a huge audience. You may never reach everyone but, you should try make the most from your target audience. Tools like Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences may help you reach a wider market.
The social media platforms currently available are crowded, so, for you to break through, you’ll need to employ the strategies for a social media boost discussed above.
To edge out your competition feature a real person. Do this by hiring someone who is good at their work. Don’t be a spammer and don’t be boring!