We have all heard the phrase that ‘content is the king’. In order to survive in the digital world, we live in, knowledge and information are everything. People need more information to advance while businesses need to produce more content to stay alive and grow in a competitive environment. Needless to say, every brand needs a plan, a strategy that will give them authority and allow them to stand out in the market.

Using social media to connect with people around, friends and family sounds very easy and entertaining, and is when used for those purposes. Organizations and companies however use it for completely different reasons. They need traffic for their website, Engagements on the posts and better leads from audience, which is not at all easy.

To use social media to its full potential in a business environment needs tactics and smarts. You really need to understand your targeted audience and what they want to hear from you. Once you know them, their behaviors and perceptions, you will be able to get the engagements you want on the content.

Connect

Brands that focus more on having actual connection with target audience and consumers rather than filling news feeds with advertisements achieve more success. The growth of these companies is fast as their customers trust them more. There are different ways to interact with users on social media. Some brands go with sass and a little bit of unconventional humor when responding back to comments, while others are super nice or neutral. An entertainment company cannot be serious in their conversations as their job is to provide a good time. A Facebook page focused on providing breaking news from all over the world has to state facts and figures hence they need to be formal and professional in their interactions.

The goal should be to let audience know that you are there for them. Trust is the most essential component of a healthy relationship between business and its customers. Credibility and trust get the company loyal customers which serve as the brand ambassadors and face of the brand to other users on Facebook. Reviews from these audiences are most important as their recommendations carry a lot of weight in front of general public.

As a marketer, your focus should also be on networking with influencers and industry professionals. Experts have a power in defining trends and shaping the way of news stories or campaigns, which is keeping them close can give you upper hand.

Social media influencers have the power that can either shoot your business to the sky or make it disappear in the matter of weeks. You need these people on your sides because they are most trustworthy among audience. They work independently so their opinions carry weight and are considered reliable. Influencers partner up with the businesses they admire and share same ideology with. In search for a reliable influencer, you must consider the fact that they share the same opinions and views as your brand, so you do not compromise the image.

Stay Active

To make an impression in the digital world, you need to be present all the time. Online presence and visibility are the key components in giving your company a considerable standing in the competitive market when starting the business. Use all available social channels that can be managed in the allocated budget to promote the content and products and services you offer.

Building awareness is the focus of every new business in the market as without awareness no one will notice you amongst the sea of established competitors.

Posting on Facebook in the form of status updates, photos and videos is pivotal to the social media growth. Posting statuses and website blog links on the page give users an opportunity to view, share and interact with your content. Through comments and reply section, deepen the relationship with audience and potential customers.

Reply to all everyone and acknowledge the opinions of users. If anyone has a query, try to answer it immediately and keep the conversation going as long as you can. It is understandable that you cannot sit in front of a laptop of use smartphone to access social media all day and it is possible to miss few comments made in that time. To avoid leaving anyone out, set a time to go through whole comments section. It can be in the evening or morning depending on when your day ends. In that time, check your inbox and make your presence visible in comments thread.

Analytics

How can you make sure that your campaign is on the right track and is actually reaching the target audience? Too often, marketers build whole campaigns and invest a lot in them without realizing that they are failing and bringing zero to nothing return on investment.

With modern technology and advancements, the chances of complete failures are slim as you can find out the results as the campaign is in progress. Google analytics and other third party softwares can fetch analytics and data from the websites to let you know which campaigns are working and which ones are not.

Analytics are crucial not only for ongoing campaigns but also for shaping the future campaigns. You can even find out which format works and which does not. Between visuals and live stream videos, if video gathers more engagements and shares it will be sensible to plan the future live streams instead of focusing on graphics. Similarly, analytics can also find out the type of people the campaign has had most effect on. With one graph or table, you can see whether your content resonates better with youngsters and teens or elders.

Social media strategy has no one typical design standard. Every company and every brand has different approach and it is totally possible that two opposite types of campaigns work perfectly fine for two competitors. In social media, you need creativity and the ability to be unique. If you have those talents, you can pull anything off when planned right and executed perfectly.