With over 3.02 billion active social media users by 2021, piecing together a coherent social media strategy is not only advised, but essential.
It’s no secret that social media is one of the most effective ways to connect with both current and potential customers online. And, according to Buffer, market leaders Facebook and Instagram have some of the highest user databases around, user databases which your business can use in tandem with a solid social media strategy to grow your brand and increase revenue.
If you’re not taking advantage of social media, you’re missing out on a ton of benefits. In this article, we’re going to focus on the benefits of social media for growth. Scroll down as we walk you through the detailed steps for using social media to accelerate your online business’s growth.
1. Create a Solid Social Media Strategy
In this day and age, a strong social media strategy is what separates successful online businesses from the rest. As such, before you even start thinking about creating an account online, you will need to develop a clear and robust plan that clearly defines your social media marketing goals going forward.
Having a plan will ensure that you have a clear business goal, a strategy to help you achieve that goal, and a means to measure your business’s growth as you go along. By creating a solid plan first, you ensure that every social effort you put in will be in the right direction.
Follow these steps to create your social media strategy for your online business:
• Conduct a social media audit
• Set your social media goals and objectives
• Research your competitors’ social media accounts
• Create a social media calendar
However, if creating a social media plan seems tasking, a professional writing service review sites like Pick The Writer can help you with this process.
You might also like Brand Building: 6 Ways to Manage Your Social Media Reputation
2. Know your Audience
Another critical step in growing your business online is knowing your audience. Understanding who your audience is and what motivates them will help you better connect with them. To do this, you can:
• Compile existing data on your current customer base
• Use social media analytics (directly from Instagram and Facebook) to understand who makes up the more significant portion of your audience
• Build a buyer persona to understand what makes your audience
These are just a few ways to understand your audience, and it is only by knowing them that you can truly engage with them and grow your business.
3. Expand your Audience
So, you have taken the proper steps to understand who your audience is; now it’s time to expand your audience base. Expansion here is essential as the more people you’re able to reach organically, the easier it is to build your brand and meet your goals.
Here’s a guide for expanding your audience base on Instagram:
• Look for ways to reach your target audience on social media
Certain social media tools provide brands with features that help target more people like their existing audience. For example, HootSuite’s lookalike audiences feature can be used by brands anywhere in the world to target people similar to their current audience who might be interested in them.
• Use ads that worked well for your existing audience, and expand the audience reach
For example, if your current audience is largely based in Bangkok, and you would like to expand your audience base to other regions, run an ad that performs well for your existing audience, and increase the ad’s location reach to other parts of Thailand or Southeast Asia.
4. Use the Right Social Media Tools
Another way to use social media to drive growth for your business is to use various social media tools to your advantage.
There are a ton of social media tools that can simplify your online growth, from the simple scheduling of posts to data-driven stats on the best time to post your content. These tools will make growing your online business that much easier, removing the necessity to hire a full-blown social media team entirely.
5. Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Website With Social Media
Another measure of online growth is an increase in website traffic. Luckily for you, social media can be used as a tool to drive traffic to your website.
By using target centric Facebook advertising, you can drive quality traffic to your online store. Now, we say ‘target centric’, because while it’s relatively easy to use Facebook and Instagram ads to drive traffic to your website, it’s all pointless if you don’t know how to convert these ‘scrollers’ into real leads.
Luckily, several sites have tips such as this ultimate guide to running instagram stories which can help you make your business ads work.
This also takes us back to step 2: ‘Knowing Your Customers’. When you know your customers – and we mean really know your customers – you will be able to market to them in a way that turns them from browsers to buyers, which of course is your ultimate goal.
6. Automate Social Media Posting to Free Up More Time for Engagement
Also, if you want your business to grow on social media fast, then you need to take engagement very seriously. Unfortunately, engagement can be very time consuming, especially when there are other things you need to do to grow online.
That’s why it’s so crucial that you use social media tools to automate your content posting and free you up to spend more time engaging with your customers and growing your social media account.
7. Use Influencer Marketing to Drive Sales and Build Brand Awareness
According to the Digital Marketing Institute, 49% of buyers depend on influencer recommendations. So, partnering with certain influencers that align with your brand is a sure way to increase your sales and brand awareness.
8. Track Performance
Lastly, track your social media strategy performance. It is vital to monitor the strategies that bring in results, as well as the ones that don’t. This will let you know what to focus on and what to stop pushing.
Various social media analytics tools help you track your performance. Facebook and Instagram even have inbuilt analytics tools that you can use to track your performance.
Once you figure out which of your strategies are working for you, you can then start optimising. You should do this by carrying out A/B testing.
In Summary
All the steps mentioned in this social media guide are useful moves to help grow your online business. If you want to see marked online growth by the end of the year, you need to follow these steps religiously.
If these steps feel overwhelming, you can always just start with the first few ones, and work your way down.
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