Social Media

The world of social media is a vast and varied place and it’s become crucial for businesses and organisations to keep up with trends and platforms. But where do you start? Who is the target audience? How do you grow your social following and maintain interest? Here are a few things we’ve found beneficial, hope you do too.
The crucial first step of growing your social media following is Identify your Goals and Objectives.
It’s important to understand what your aim is for your social media campaigns. What are you looking to achieve? A loyal following? Mass brand advertising and awareness? Interaction from customers? Product focus? All of the above (and more)? There is no point whatsoever in just randomly posting for the sake of posting. There needs to be a purpose, a strategy, a focus. Posting randomly will not encourage a loyal following because it is so erratic. You may have heard the saying “targeting everyone means targeting no one”. People will not commit because unless they know for sure there’s a benefit to them. Understand your main objectives and run with it.
Within the umbrella of Identifying Goals and Objectives while growing your social media following, is understanding your audience. It’s all very well trying to target anyone and everyone, but no two people are the same. Revert to who your client base actually is, which demographic is it? Male, Female? Under 25, over 50? Somewhere in the middle? Who engages with your brand? Answer all of these questions and then tailor your content to pique the interest of your consumers.
Now, you’ve understood who your social media client base is. Next, you need to understand them. Create content and posts which are relevant to their interests. Information which is relevant to products or services you provide. Posting content of goats and kittens is unlikely to generate a loyal following if you are a high-end car manufacturer.

Next Steps

Create icons and links. Once you’ve harvested your clients interest on social media, as with all good things, they are likely to want more. Your social media following may want to learn more about you and your brand. Don’t make them hunt you down, make it easy and create links to your website on your social media accounts, and vice versa. The more they know, the more they’ll want to know.
Compiling a social media strategy is also pivotal. You don’t want to lose all the followers you have worked so hard to build by generating random and irrelevant posts. Sit down, and plan. Add upcoming events and notifications that your clients will find useful to start with. Then, create a strategy of posts which link in with all the different platforms and ensure they are all coherent and fluid. Different people use different platforms, and you don’t want anyone to miss out.
Incorporate your emails. We email all day long every day. You have a footer specifically tailored with your name, title and contact details. Why miss out your social media details? These days your social media information is just as important as your contact information. Pull through more followers by encouraging your email contact to follow you too.
Be consistent. We have already mentioned how to avoid erratic random posts, the next trick is not to be erratic with your posts. You don’t want to post 20 posts one week and nothing for the next 3 weeks. That is a sure fire way to lose interest quickly. As part of your plan to grow your social media following, create a time frame for when your posts should be triggered, and ensure they are either posts or scheduled efficiently.
The final pearl of wisdom I will leave is to use your platforms to go one step further in customer service. Social media removes the barriers of communication between client and company. If someone has a question, a word of praise or an unfortunate complaint, deal with it appropriately. Communication goes a long way to resolve disputes and promote customer satisfaction.
Like what you’ve read so far? Keep an eye out for more of our upcoming blogs here.