What Marketers Can Do To Strategically Create Social Media Buzz

Using social media to grow your business is no longer just an option; it’s an essential piece of any marketer’s toolkit. It’s one of the most effective and efficient ways to reach new customers, build relationships with existing clients, gain valuable business insights and get your products or services noticed.

There are now over 4.2 billion active social media users in the world; that’s half the global population! Not all of those people are likely to become your customers, of course, but it goes some way towards showing the potential you’re missing out on if you don’t effectively use social media.

Most brands know the inherent value of social media for marketing, branding and advertising, but many fail to get the right results. With more businesses using social media and greater competition than ever for users’ attention, in order to stand out from the crowd it’s no longer good enough to be there; you need to have your socials absolutely nailed.

For that to happen, a solid social media strategy is a must. With a little planning and focus, your social media marketing strategy can transform your business from just another voice in the crowd to an effective, engaging online presence that generates buzz, connects with customers and ultimately converts into greater sales volumes.

Whether you’re working for a large enterprise, just getting a startup off the ground or you’re part of an SME and looking for marketing strategies for small businesses, here’s some essential tips on how to optimize your social media strategy to generate maximum buzz and engagement.

Know why you’re on social media

Before you put any plan or strategy into place, first you need to zero in on exactly why you’re using social media and what you’re hoping to achieve from it.

That might sound painfully obvious, but it’s an important thing to get right. You’d be surprised how many others have no real grasp of why they’re on social media at all and only maintain a presence because every other brand is doing it!

Whether you want to boost your brand awareness, supercharge customer engagement, improve your support service or directly drive increased sales or leads, once you’ve answered the ‘why’ you can use that to inform a clearer and more effective ‘how’.

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Know your audience

Customer intelligence (CI) is a vital resource for any business and having a comprehensive understanding of your customers and audience is a crucial part of any social media strategy. However, it’s not always one which businesses get right.

Knowing who you’re talking to, and how they like to interact with your brand, will not only help to inform the type of content you create but also which social platforms you should be on – and which you shouldn’t.

Stuck for ideas? Check out what some of your biggest competitors are up to, which platforms they post on and how they interact with their audiences. If it works for them, there’s a strong chance it will work for you.

Focus on shareable content

Most marketers and social media managers will be familiar with the phenomenon of ever-declining organic reach on Facebook and Instagram, something which makes the importance of high-quality original content more important than ever.

Putting a focus on creating buzzworthy content and social posts which are highly shareable and spark conversations is one of the best ways to boost your effectiveness. This can help get your brand and content seen by more people without having to resort to paid strategies or boosted posts.

But wait, what if your brand is “too boring” to create shareable content? Take inspiration from some other businesses who’ve turned dull subject matter into amazing social media strategies and you’ll quickly realize there’s no such thing as too boring!

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Optimize posts for each platform

One of the most common mistakes that businesses make is sharing the exact same posts across each of their social media platforms with no differentiation or optimization for each. You’ll likely have seen this yourself, where a Facebook post looks suspiciously like something that was written for Twitter and then simply cross-shared – hashtags intact!

It might be quick and easy, but it’ll typically result in much lower performance and engagement than if each post is tailored to each platform. As the saying goes, if something’s worth doing then it’s worth doing right.

The unfortunate truth is you’ll never be able to grow a dedicated following on your channels by using generic strategies or re-shared content. By tailoring your output to each platform, you’ll cultivate much more meaningful engagement and drive traffic and customers that will actually convert.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean you need to create completely unique posts for every single platform, but it is worth keeping in mind the strengths and weaknesses of each. For example, visual content with short captions will typically perform much better on Instagram while longer, text-led posts will be much more appropriate for a platform like LinkedIn.

Prioritize consistency over virality

“We need to go viral!”. Oh boy. Of all the demands you’ll come up against as a marketer, surely none will send cold shivers down your spine quicker than this one.

It can be hard not to sometimes look at big accounts with their millions of views and think ‘Gee, if only we had that kind of reach and engagement’. But beyond the vanity figures, how many of those people would be likely to convert into solid leads or customers for your business?

Furthermore, not every brand, social post or piece of content has the potential to go viral, nor do they need to. The use of affiliate marketing, influencer partnerships, integrating other business touchpoints into a multi-channel marketing strategy or even the use of branded AR lenses on platforms like Snapchat show that your socials don’t need to #breaktheinternet in order to be effective.

Instead of chasing big numbers, opt for consistency, relevance and quality at all points of your social media strategy. Not only will this yield greater results for your business or service over the long term, it’s a much more achievable and sustainable approach that will build and reinforce your brand and values.

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Leverage trends… but only where appropriate

Taking advantage of trending topics can be one of the most effective ways to spark conversations, grow your follower account, establish yourself as a trusted thought leader within your industry and massively boost your brand awareness.

Exercise caution though. Plenty of businesses have unwittingly ended up on the wrong side of social media trends; take the heavy backlash many brands received for their responses to the passing of Queen Elizabeth as just one recent example!

It’s important to remember that not every trending topic is appropriate for your business or for your audience. If it works for you then leveraging trends is a great addition to any social media strategy, but just because it’s trending doesn’t mean you need to be on it.

Put the ‘social’ back in ‘social media’!

The clue might be there in the name, but there’s still a tendency for some businesses to treat their social channels like an old-school broadcast platform, only to be left scratching their heads and wondering why their engagement is so low.

Catapulting your message out there into the online ether might work well enough in some cases, but if scaling up a business on social media is your priority then genuine connection and interaction is one of the most efficient – if overlooked – ways to achieve that.

It doesn’t have to be particularly resource intensive or time-consuming either. Simply by being helpful, responsive and interacting with your customers it helps to build trust and sends a clear message that your brand is reachable, reliable and in touch with their needs.

For example, if you’re a call center software business and you spot a potential customer or client seeking the best call center software, simply reaching out and recommending yourself can be an easy way to get the ball rolling!

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Measure, adjust accordingly, then measure again

Your follower count is growing, your engagement rates are through the roof and conversions from your social channels have never been higher. But do you actually know why, or how you can repeat that success in the future?

In order for your social media strategy to work – and to make sure you’re not just striking it lucky – measuring and tracking your performance is crucial. The best way to get started is to measure your ‘base’ social performance, then make some small tweaks and adjustments to your content, posting times or approach and measure again to see the impact it’s had. One way to help with this involves analyzing and interpreting your data using AI marketing software.

That way you can build a clearer picture of exactly what works for your audience and what doesn’t. It’s also important as the algorithms which drive each social media platform are constantly evolving, so evolving your social strategy in step is the only way to properly future-proof your approach and ensure you’re keeping up with the times.

There are any number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can measure your social media success against, but if you’re not sure where to begin just ask yourself the following questions and pick KPIs and metrics which match accordingly:

• Am I reaching the right people?
• Are they engaging with my posts?
• Are any of my social followers inquiring about my product or service?
• Are any of them successfully becoming customers or clients?

Keep and maintain a content calendar

On the other side of the coin, sometimes on social media it pays to be proactive as much as reactive. If you find it difficult to keep your social media posts consistent and high quality, then a content calendar is an absolute must.

It doesn’t have to be particularly resource-intensive and can be as simple as a document or spreadsheet with a list of ideas and calendar events relevant to your brand or business, so you have a reservoir of content ideas to pull from ahead of time.

Not only will it lend itself to better quality content with more time to plan and execute ideas in advance, you can be secure in the knowledge you’ll never have to chew your nails off trying to find something to post about ever again!

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Use hashtags and use ‘em right

Using hashtags effectively is one of the best ways to boost your followers across social media. In fact, it’s estimated that social posts which include at least one hashtag generate about 12.6% more engagement than posts which include none.

Not sure where to begin? A good idea is to include one to two branded hashtags that are specific to your business, which reinforces your brand while also giving social media users a way to find all posts related to you.

You can also use one of the many online hashtag generators, which will automatically put together a list of high-traffic hashtags relevant to your business, brand or interest. Just make sure to avoid the dreaded mistake of #hashtagging #every #single #word, it doesn’t work like that!

Partner with influencers

Don’t let misconceptions scare you off: partnering with the right influencers can be one of the most effective ways to really supercharge your social media presence. Not only will it boost your brand’s social proof, you’ll also be leveraging the fact that influencers will typically have much greater reach and engagement than your business does.

Interestingly, trends show that social media users are increasingly leaning towards authentic online content: that which comes across as more ‘real’ compared to heavily polished and overly branded content.

This is a great opportunity for marketers who might not have access to large budgets or production capabilities to get their message out there via influencer content, though a solid influencer strategy can work for all businesses from small startups to global brands.

Be mindful when selecting the influencers you’d like to partner with, however, as reach and follower count isn’t everything. A makeup artist or lifestyle influencer might be an excellent fit for a fast-fashion ecommerce brand, but not such a great choice for a legal firm or software company.

Social Media Buzz Guide

Creating an effective social media strategy is the first and most essential step of using social media to grow your business; a solid strategy will make the rest of the process a cakewalk but without one you’ll have a difficult time achieving solid, repeatable results beyond some short-term successes.

It might seem like a daunting task, particularly if you’re putting together a social media marketing plan for the very first time, but keep a few critical elements in mind and everything else will take shape from there:

• Why: Define your purpose and how your social media marketing will help your brand
• Who: Make an effort to understand your customers and your audience’s needs and wants
• How: Decide which platforms you’ll use, what type of content you’ll post and how you’ll measure performance

Whether you’re building a small business from the ground up or looking to level up the social strategy for a large enterprise, these quick tips will help you supercharge your social media effectiveness!