Seven Social Strategies to Earn More Business

Creating a presence in the social sphere isn’t a question in today’s economy; it’s a requirement. When a customer decides which company to choose for a service or product, they’re probably going to do two things first: Check the company’s online reviews and check its social media footprint. 

Your social strategy is a key element of your larger marketing efforts and often holds as much weight as your website when influencing potential and existing customer decisions.  Not only that, with online scams on the rise every year (and the pandemic exacerbating that trend), an authentic social presence can mean the difference between making a sale and losing customers to more established businesses with a strong social brand. 

Making your social media presence socially acceptable means more than occasionally posting and updating your ad offers, though. Showing sincerity in the content you publish, choosing your messaging thoughtfully, and planning out how you release that content very carefully are all keys to the success of your overall efforts on social media.

Read on for seven quick social media tips that will help you set goals and create content that entices new customers to your page, your website, and ultimately towards choosing your brand when it comes time to convert!

Set Your Intentions

Before you can be successful, you have to know what success looks like, and it looks different to everyone. Setting clear goals will help you to identify which metrics are most useful for tracking and achieving your goals.

For example, if you just want to increase brand awareness, you can track how many people are navigating to your website via social media and work to grow that number. You’ll also want to look at your content’s reach, impressions, and engagement.

The number of impressions refers to the number of times your content was added to a person’s feed. This doesn’t take into account whether or not the user actually saw the piece, nor if the content was displayed multiple times to the same user. 

Reach refers to the number of unique individuals who actually see the content show up in their feed, and engagement—arguably the most important factor of these three—is the number of users who take an action based on your content such as liking, sharing, or commenting on it.

Time-Sensitive Content

Ephemeral content, or content that is made and disappears within a short time frame, is a huge opportunity for marketers to show a more authentic side of a business. Because the nature of this content makes it feel less formal, your customers feel like they’re getting a peek behind the curtain. 

Popularized by Snapchat, stories are a feature now available on most social sharing platforms. Sprinkle in stories throughout your channels that familiarize your audience with your vision and mission to show your audience the purposeful values behind your business.

Short-Form Video

Vine may be dead (RIP), but TikTok has brought about the resurgence of micro-videos. Whether you make a TikTok account, showcase your videos on an Instagram reel, or add an impromptu update to your story, short videos can help you humanize your business quickly. There are tons of ways you can use bite-sized video content to educate, entertain, and connect with your audience. 

Short videos appeal to the average person’s ever-shortening attention span. And because videos can engage your audience both visually and audibly, they’re more likely to remember your message than they would reading written content or seeing graphics alone.

Timeliness

Where evergreen content can be updated, republished, and reused often, timely content shows your audience you’re keeping a beat on the important things that are happening now. This work happens two-fold. 

First, it means ensuring you address important holidays, news stories, or events. Although you won’t need content for every single holiday, prepping for big spending holidays and other smaller time-sensitive events and news stories that make sense for your business is helpful for your overall strategy.

Make sure you’re posting at the time of day your audience is most likely to see your work

Schedule the release of your content using a third party app so it always goes out when you need it, and use those apps to track your customers’ online movement so you can see when they’re most likely to be looking at your page

Ask Your Customers About Themselves

Polls, quizzes, and interactive content are becoming more widely used every day, and users are less wary to insert their opinions using these methods than they have been in the past. Polls on social media stories or posts give your audience an opportunity to tell you what they think with one click. 

This is an easy entry point to ask for opinions you can use to make changes later on. Polls and other interactive content allow you to gather intimate, real-time information from your audience, increase your engagement, and gain the insight necessary to drive future decisions all at once.

Content Collaboration

Working with other companies through co-branding partnerships is a way to add value to contents and cast a wider net to an even bigger audience. This strategy can be especially useful for small businesses looking to appeal to a larger share of their local market.

By connecting with other local businesses whose products or services combine well with your own, you can promote mutual growth and build lasting partnerships that can help you in the future.

Instant Gratification

As we’ve mentioned, the ever-shortening attention span of the average person is impacting the user journey in multiple ways. One of the areas most impacted is the buying journey, in which users are abandoning online shopping carts due to overly complicated (and click-heavy) checkout processes.

Meta changed their Facebook Instant Experiences to include instant storefronts, instant customer acquisition, instant storytelling, and an instant lookbook. Even with other platforms gaining popularity with younger users, Facebook still remains the most widely used social media platform among U.S. adults according to the Pew Research Center. So, getting up to speed with the latest 

Adjustment is Necessary for Growth

Creating a lane for yourself on social media can be daunting. Fortunately, the only way to guarantee you’ll fail is not to try! Use these ideas to adjust your content strategy (or your client’s) to help build engagement and earn more business this year.