Social networks are an important social and cultural institution of the modern world. Their rapid growth in popularity and usefulness since the early 2000s has made them part of our everyday experience.
As you could probably assume, social media are of crucial importance for marketing. No copywriter career goes without learning how to manage social media. It’s because, in marketing, we want to approach people and share our stories. Thanks to social content marketing channels, this is easier than it has ever been.
Now, the big question is: what can be done to effectively communicate with customers without being intrusive or irritating?
The good news is that a lot can be done, although it might take some time to figure out what is best for your business in particular. In this blog post, you will find some professional tips on what it takes to excel in content marketing on your social media.
10 Tips On Working Out Your Social Media Content Strategy
Conceiving and then performing your social media marketing strategy sounds simple, but it takes some experience and knowledge to do it properly.
The following tips will help you better understand what’s expected of you in the virtual space of social media.
#1 Profile Your Audience and Determine Goals
In order to get to know your audience, you will have to do thorough market research. This is one of the most important steps for starting your own business. Once you do that, you will be able to decide on the general goals of your strategic communication. And the main goal of every marketing campaign is to build a strong audience base.
Every brand and business wants different people to be their audience. It is necessary to know very well who we are speaking to.
In marketing, the other way of saying this is to say outlining your buyer persona, a.k.a., a person who is most likely to be interested in your product and services. Which age and sex would this person be? Which interests do they have? Knowing answers to these questions is crucial because the characteristics of the buyer persona will decide on the form and content of all social media posts.
What do you want to provide your customers with, and what do you want to achieve? Some sort of creative brief template could be helpful here, to give you some structure while you’re brainstorming.
Is it only more sales, or do you also aim for social media lead generation? Whatever it is, it is important to be precise here. The goals will enable you to be consistent in your overall approach, despite many different posts over time.
#2 Feel Free to Use Other People’s Content (Just Don’t Forget the Credits!)
Whether we like it or not, we are not alone in whatever we do. We can be sure there is always some content relevant to our story out there on the Internet. Sometimes we take it as competition, but sometimes we can use it.
Actually, some marketing experts recommend that around two-thirds of posts should refer to the work of other people. You don’t have to agree with that proportion, but what’s important here is that this saves time and keeps your feed more dynamic.
So, if you ever come across some online content that is not only consistent with your values and goals but also made in such a good way, pay respect to these people’s work by posting it yourself. This makes your customers feel like they are members of an even wider community.
#3 Use Help to Create and Collect Content
If you are interested in maintaining your social media professionally, it is always a good idea to use some kind of social media content creator. These tools create and schedule posts across platforms, making social media maintenance much easier.
Content creation can sometimes be very exciting, but it can also be very time-consuming. This is especially true for start-ups, that still don’t have entire marketing teams focused only on this.
Therefore, although humans are irreplaceable for conceiving content, sometimes content creator apps can help us with inspiration.
For example, you could use tools for creating content on Instagram. We know that posts with short videos reach much more people than those with only text or pictures, so you can use an Instagram video maker to create short films. It will turn your message into video material quickly and easily.
#4 Repost and Repurpose Your Old Content
Recycling your own materials from the past doesn’t have to be a sign of creative fatigue. On the contrary.
If there is some issue trending in your industry niche or even news, it can be a good idea to pull out some relevant content of yours and present it to the audience once again. At the same time, this shows that you are following trends and that what you are doing is relevant.
When reposting old content, you can also repurpose it. The topic might have been particularly relevant, but in the meantime, you changed or expanded your target audience. If you do a repost, you can wrap the preamble up in a new way, to appeal to the new audiences.
Alternatively, you could share your post as a story to remind your followers of your old content. Using a tool such as Insta story maker can give you quick solutions on how to redesign old content for that purpose.
#5 Create Daily Schedule: Use Automation Tools
Social media posts are like butterflies: they don’t live long. Their lifespan ranges from 7.4 hours on YouTube to only 18 minutes on Twitter. That’s why you have to be regular, and you need a strict schedule of posting in order to maintain your online presence.
Scheduling tools and apps will enable you to spend one hour setting up all the posts for that day. If you schedule your posts like that, you have the rest of the day free. You won’t have phone alarms ringing every couple of hours, reminding you to publish something.
Posts can’t be the same on every social media, nor can they be posted at the same time (which will be discussed in more detail further on). This makes posting somewhat complicated, which is why most businesses use various task management tools to automate the process.
#6 Create Monthly Schedule: Make a Content Calendar
Before a month ends, it is a good idea to already have a plan for the next one. This will reduce a lot of anxiety surrounding the creation of posts, and make the overall posting process smooth.
A content calendar doesn’t only include information on what is going to be posted. It can also contain information on who is posting it, or whatever you see fit. Also, to make things easier, there are many free social media content calendars out there for you to choose from.
#7 Attention to the DMs: Create Saved Replies for Most Common Customer Questions
Once you create a significant audience base, people will want to contact you directly. They may send many questions to your inbox, which will take time to reply at first.
A good hack here is to notice the most common questions and save your replies to them. In such a way, you won’t need to type the same message over and over again. You will have it in your list of saved replies, ready to send with a single click.
This is a win-win strategy, because your customers get a top-quality user experience, while you save a lot of time for yourself.
#8 Know The Channels Well
Did you ever wonder why so many social media channels exist? Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok… Why do we need so many of them?
From the perspective of a business interested in promoting itself on these social media platforms, there are several reasons for this. Firstly, each of them puts emphasis on different contents. While Instagram favors pictures, text and links work better on Facebook, while TikTok is best for videos.
This is important because picking channels for advertising has to be done according to the nature of the product. If you’re into fashion, then you want to share a lot of pictures, and you will probably prefer Instagram. Facebook and LinkedIn are the most popular social media for real estate, while TikTok is also gaining popularity.
On the other hand, as already mentioned, there is the issue of posts lifespan that varies across these social media channels. Also, some platforms are better for posting more often (Twitter), while others don’t allow too many posts (LinkedIn). Therefore, Twitter and LinkedIn content strategies should be different.
#9 Keep an Eye on What People Are Saying About You
Apart from being amazing advertising channels, social media are gold mines of data. They can provide you with precious information on your audience’s feedback.
Once you’ve done everything you could, at the end of a month you should check out the results. What do people think about you? Did it change somehow?
Knowing this might not always be satisfying, but it is very useful because you can use this knowledge to adjust your marketing strategy and change your image according to your goals. Again, you can do this manually, or use some social media monitoring tools.
#10 Significant Insights: Data Analytics
Most social media provide some kind of analytical tools, which help you track the effects of your campaign. It is good to check these out regularly and know basics such as likes, shares, and comments.
Or if you want to go deeper, you can couple with other tools such as Google Analytics. They can help you track conversational fluctuations, the state of the market, and consumer intelligence.
Conclusion
Streamlining your social media marketing can seem easy at first, and then overwhelming while learning how to manage it. However, once properly mastered, it can be very useful in terms of boosting your ROI.
Using the latest technology and a variety of apps can be of great help for performing marketing strategies in general, not only on social media. From data analytics tools to AI-powered email delivery, automating advertising is a great idea.
Author: Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-petrov/
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