Moving from the start-up to the growth stages of your business isn’t without its ups and downs. But the joys of a scaling, prosperous business include seeing more transactions being made, increasing orders and converting via social media. So how do you grow your business with social media?
Social media is a strong growth builder. In the right hands, it can help improve your business reputation, increase your brand awareness, improve customer service and generate leads. Entrepreneurs can tap into this power by developing a social media strategy that engages their target audience.
In this article, we will focus on how to grow your social media.
Social Media Numbers to Know
When you work on your social media strategy, looking at optimising your posting schedule, finding the platforms where your audience is active and regularly posting used to be enough. Nowadays, there is a bigger need to please the ever-changing algorithm, as well as adapt to the habits of social media users.
Research from multiple institutions has shown the following results:
- In 2023, Edelman’s Trust Barometer Special Report indicated that 60% of consumers worldwide expect brands to be transparent on social media, indicating it builds trust when they timeously communicate about concerns and show they are human.
- 79% of users reported to Social Media Today that user-generated content impacts purchasing decisions. The same number of respondents indicated to Stacla that their purchase decisions are affected by brand content.
- Research from Sprout Social indicates that 89% of consumers follow brands to remain informed about the latest products and services.
How to Start Social Media Marketing
The first step in social media marketing is to incorporate your values, mission, vision, corporate identity such as colours, logos, moto or slogan into your page profile and content. Ensure that your profile is complete and up to date.
Next, if your pages have been open for a while, you can use your analytics to determine what the best posting times an types of content will be. If not, then you can research what works best on which platforms. Once you have identified this, you can create a posting schedule for when you will be posting what type of content on which platforms.
After this, you can focus on constructing content that will communicate the mission, values and vision of your brand, all while promoting your service and products (and promotions). Make content, whether videos, images or others, that are shareable or encourages users to interact with it.
Interacting with your content can include reposts, shares, comments, or likes. When it comes to videos such as reels or TikToks, ‘stitching’ or replying to posts through a video are also a form of engagement. Just make sure you know which metrics to focus on.
Use trends to quickly increase the reach of your content, but also keep in mind that trends have a limited time period in which you can use them. Additionally, you can test targeted advertising as well to reach individuals you otherwise wouldn’t.
If you are hiring or assigning an employee to manage your social media accounts, then you should consider setting up a social media policy or etiquette document. This document can lead the community manager in the type of content to produce, the brand identity and how to interact with messages.
Increase Conversions Through Social Media
Although social media can benefit businesses through increased brand visibility, improved audience engagement, and brand awareness, every business ultimately wants to generate leads and conversions.
Shopify suggests that brands follow the following tips to increase their conversions through social media:
- Optimise landing pages: When users click on the link you have posted, these landing pages need to be optimised.
- Use high-quality visuals: Social media is all about communicating visually. Make your visuals speak of the quality that you also measure your products to.
- Use social commerce: Some platforms allow you to add products and open a shop on-platform.
- Craft compelling calls to action: Move away from the ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ calls to action. Add some flair that will encourage people to act.
- Personalise content: Pay attention to what your audience truly responds to.
- Post user-generated content: Since 79% of people respond to user-generated content, include these in your strategy such as product review, testimonials or comments/questions.
- A/B test: A/B testing can give you a good indication of what is working and what not.
- Analyze and adjust: Once your strategy has been active for a while (one to three months), look at the data and see where you need to improve.
Now that you have insight into constructing a social media marketing plan that is backed by data, you can feel confident in your marketing efforts. Remain consistent and you will be sure to grow business with social media soon.
