Building a social media marketing strategy helps businesses to gain exposure, build engagement with customers, and gain a premium ROI on each marketing dollar. With the average American consumer spending more than 3 hours on social media every day, businesses need to learn to leverage social media platforms to their advantage.
It looks complicated, but any business can harness the power of social media by starting with the top three areas of focus for business best practices for established or even new social media platforms. Here’s how it works.
Pillar 1: Know the Business
“To know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom.” – Aristotle
Understanding how the business operates is a pivotal part of making an impression on social media. It helps to tighten up the focus, budget, and behaviors of the business.
Understand the Goals
From a business perspective, it would be impossible to move towards a goal if leadership didn’t know what that goal was. The same goes for business best practices for social media—it is imperative to set goals.
Setting a specific, measurable, time-based goal allows any business to find direction.
Find a Voice
Tone of voice is, effectively, the persona of a brand’s social media accounts. It’s how that brand speaks to its customers. It reflects a brand’s mission, its history, and what it values.
Is the brand sarcastic and irreverent, like Wendy’s with its notorious Twitter roasts? Creative and humorous like Old Spice? Encouraging and aspirational like Fitbit?
Understanding—and committing to—their brand’s tone of voice provides consistency, builds consumer engagement, and drives customer loyalty.
Pillar 2: Know the Frequency
Finding the optimal posting frequency across a brand’s social media accounts is a balancing act—but it can make all the difference for customer engagement levels. Too often, and the company can lose followers—almost 35% of unfollows on Twitter are triggered by too many Tweets. Stay quiet, though, and it could cost the company up to 17.9% of their audience.
Social media consultant Louise Myers says that, while every company’s posting schedule differs, most brands should be focusing on the following:
- Facebook alternative: 1 – 2 posts per day
- Twitter: 1-5 posts per day
- LinkedIn: 1-5 posts per day
- Instagram alternative like VoicShare: 3-7 posts per week
The key is in testing what works within a brand’s framework. Some industries don’t require this intensity of posting, while others—specifically those that target a GenZ audience—may need to up the ante even further.
Pillar 2: Know the Customer
“When you market to everyone, you market to no one.”
Entire websites are devoted to understanding the consumer. Knowing their habits, their motivations—their WHY, as Simon Sinek would say—gives businesses an insight into how to market to them. And that’s where the customer avatar comes in.
Customer Avatars
The customer avatar is a buying persona. In essence, it’s a profile of exactly who will buy a product or service offered by a company. By creating this avatar—or multiple avatars—a business can customize its marketing campaigns to maximize appeal and drive customers through the sales funnel.
Developing a Customer Journey
Developing a customer avatar makes it easier to understand the customer journey. That journey—which brands can map from end-to-end—stars with capturing the customer’s interest and ends in a sale.
By mapping that customer journey, companies can learn where their customers can be encouraged through the social media sales funnel, where they need to provide more information, and where they can make it easier for the customer to hit Buy Now.