Putting your brand on social media seems like an obvious necessity when setting up or growing your business. You have an audience of nearly 4 billion people, and studies have shown that around half of those users use social media to check out brands online. This creates a giant space for you to improve your brand awareness and share your company’s personality. However, putting yourself out there also creates risks for you when done incorrectly, especially amongst a younger audience. In this article, we’re going to be exploring some of the pros and cons associated with putting yourself on social media.
1. It’s not always about how you do it, it’s also about whether or not you should
A lot of companies see being on social media as simply what you’re ‘supposed’ to do in the modern era, especially with the massive additional movement towards a more digital world in the last couple of years. However, it shouldn’t always be seen as an absolute given. Without the proper time, resources, or motivation to fully develop your social presence, you may actually see your social media become detrimental to your business. You may try to position your company as modern, successful, and completely in charge, but if someone clicks on a Twitter or LinkedIn link on your website and unearths mostly abandoned pages with half a dozen followers and absolutely nothing interesting to read, it can actually discredit the hard work you do elsewhere. Once created, these pages need to be consistently utilised and not just left barren, and, as such, you should only be creating pages that your company has the resources to properly manage.
2. Maintain a consistent identity across all of your chosen platforms
Depending on the size of your company, you may want to appoint someone specific to fully govern your social activity. By having a single person monitoring your feeds, they’ll be able to keep the channels fresh and active, forming consistent relationships and a consistent tone of voice when interacting with followers. Being on the platforms regularly also allows them to be reactive to news and events, and present when it comes to responding to comments and messages.
3. Plan out your posts in advance so you can focus on utilising the platform fully
Another vital part of making the most of your social channels is to be reliable with your posting schedule. If you plan to send out ten different messages at once and then disappear for three weeks, you may not see the engagement you hope for. It’s important to space your posts out evenly, to ensure that you’re continually popping up in the feeds of your followers. You want them to get familiar with your content, and, by extension, familiar with your brand.
When planning out your schedule, it may be tempting to get an automation tool to cue things up for weeks or months in advance, however, if you go down this route, you want to make sure not to just leave it to its own devices until you next have to cue up another batch. If you’re not present on the platforms, you’ll struggle to understand the nuances that define them, as well as missing out on the chances to send timely comment responses, amass your audience, and react to topical events.
4. Create or share content that matters to the people that matter to you
It’s all well and good to nail your platforms, schedule, and interactions, but it’s the content that actually brings people to your page. We’ve seen brands that think they’re doing a great job with maintaining a strong social presence simply because of the number of posts they put out, but if you don’t understand your audience and the things they want to see, hear, or read, then a lot of this content that you may have worked hard to produce or source may actually be served to people who have no interest in your content or your company. The key, as with many, many things, is quality over quantity. If your stream seeks only to reshare big news topics, memes, orgeneric updates, you’re going to have to compete with so many other places on the internet that have the time and resources to do a better job than you. What you need to offer is content catered specifically to your audience. You want to share content that is hyper-relevant to the interests of the kinds of people who you consider to be viable potential customers.
Your company should already have identified exactly who your archetype customers are. To understand your audience, you’ll need to discern the topics and content that they would be looking to discover on social media in the first place. If you can offer them that, then you’ve earned your place in their feed. You may need to do some work upfront to nail these topics, but it’s a vital step when starting out. If you’re part of a fintech firm, you may want to share or create articles around industry breakthroughs, pioneering startups, or significant investment rounds. If you represent a sustainable construction company, you may want to champion green material developments, government legislations or rising environmental petitions.
Become a highlight of your audience's update feed
There's plenty more to say and far deeper we can dive, but mastering your social presence is an ongoing piece of work, albeit one that will hugely impact your business, when handled correctly. That being said, this article presents some strong starting points for you.
Discern the correct social platforms and environments for your brand to become involved in.
Create and maintain a consistent tone of voice that accurately represents your brand across your entire social ecosystem.
Plan and structure your social schedules to allow for adequate time spent within your chosen platforms.
Carefully select or create the kind of content that will resonate with your ideal audience and ideal clientele.
If you can master the suggestions listed, then not only are you positioning yourself as a relatable, affable authority in your field, but you’re ensuring that, when one of your followers decides that they’re in need of the services or products that you offer, you’re already on their mind.
