Social media is one of the easiest and most effective ways to maintain an active online presence. It’s free and there is a great chance that your audience is already using social media platforms so it makes sense to connect with them there.
However, it is not necessarily easy or intuitive to create a highly engaging social media page that your target audience will find, follow, and get value from. Fortunately, there are steps that you can take to improve and optimize your brand’s social media content to get the best results. Here are some ways that you can accomplish this.
Optimize Per Social Media Platform
Every social media platform is different. The best practices that you should use to optimize content for each platform varies. You should not attempt to create one version of a social media post to simply paste on all networks. Instead, you should create variations that are optimized for the social media platform you plan to post it on.
Each social media network has its own preferences for:
- PIcture size and dimensions
- Use of hashtags
- Length of post
- Audiences and types of content
Develop a Brand Voice
It is a smart idea to develop a consistent brand voice that your followers can recognize on social media and from your brand in general. Content that is boring, generic, or copied from somewhere else is easy to ignore on social media. Think about the content that you interact with personally on social media. Some of it likely is more interesting because of the brand’s tone and voice.
Be Conscious About Audience’s Needs
You should always be acutely aware of what kind of content your target audience wants to read and where there are gaps in what’s available already on social media. It’s nearly impossible to grow a strong social media following if the content that you post isn’t what people want to read.
There are many different ways that you can find out what content your audience wants. First, you could always ask them! Posting polls and asking customers to participate in focus groups is an excellent way to gather more information about their needs so that you can better serve them.
You can also conduct some market research. Look at which of your competitors have the largest followings and most engaging pages on social media. What kind of content are they posting? Are there any opportunities to replicate this type of content for your own audience?
There are online tools, such as Google Keyword Planner and SEMRush, that can give you further insight into what your audience searches for online. This can give you an idea of what topics you may want to feature on social media, as you will have confirmation that your audience has shown some interest in it.
Test and Monitor
No matter what your market research suggests, it is always critical to test out social media strategies to see which ones work and to monitor performance. You don’t want to waste time trying to use a social media strategy that won’t work well to deliver the results that you need. The only way to know what works best for your company and market is to test it.
You can look through your top performing posts on each network to see which posts got the most engagement through likes, comments, and shares. Ideally, you would take what works about one post and replicate it throughout new posts to see if it will help with other posts. This could include the length of the post or the type of image that you used.
Include High-Quality Images, Infographics, and Videos
Both written content and images matter on social media. In many cases, text-only social media posts will fail to perform and engage with your followers. People are very visual and often respond better to beautiful, high-quality images. It is a good idea to include images, infographics, and videos on most of your posts.
While there are times when it’s perfectly okay to use stock images, realize that many other social media accounts may also use stock images and graphics. By sharing what already exists, there is little incentive for users to share your company’s content specifically. When possible, it is worth the extra effort to get 100% original images and visual content to include in your posts. It means that people will be more likely to share it.
The quality of your brand’s social media content ultimately dictates how well it will perform and grow your company’s online following. KitelyTech can help you with your company’s SEO efforts, including SEO, mobile app development, and AI. Contact us at (800) 274 2908 to learn more about how we can help you achieve your goals for social media.
