The use of social media websites and digital media marketing techniques by and within corporations is no new topic. Many small entrepreneurial start-ups to mid-size businesses and huge multinational firms, all use social media to reach their audience in unique and exciting ways.
What has been evident is that many businesses find it challenging to reach or communicate effectively with their target audiences through the various social media platforms available today. While small start-ups can argue that huge firms have bigger marketing budgets to reach their audience, what is also true is that other strategies can be put in place to achieve success.
The question then is, how do corporate organizations enhance their social media accounts? Let’s go over some of the strategies that do not involve breaking the bank yet work like magic.
1. Set Goals
One of the reasons corporate social media accounts don’t seem to work well is because the brands that own them don’t have specific goals behind creating them. As absurd as that sounds, it is merely the truth. It is hard to say precisely what you want to achieve if you don’t set goals for it.
In this regard, the SMART goals strategy works. In other words, to enhance your corporate social media accounts, ensure you have specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. It is when you have those five things spelt out that you can begin said to be interested in enhancing or optimizing your social media accounts.
2. Identify and Understand Your Audience
Your ability to identify your target audience should come immediately after setting your SMART goals. This is important because you will be able to focus your attention on what matters. Your target audience could be your prospective customers, industry players or even influencers.
After you must have identified them, then you need to understand their personas. In doing so, you will be able to figure out what social media platform to be active on, the type of post to publish, your brand voice and information on your profile. Don’t spin your wheels; focus on posting contents that speak to your defined audience.
3. Be Human – Talk with Your Audience
The main goal of social media platforms is to create social engagements. You have to let your audience know that you are human, else you lose them. We are in the modern age, and you can’t publicize yourself as a faceless corporation.
It is excellent for your brand if your audience can relate with you on a personal level. Let some of your content include images and videos of your workforce whenever they are relaxed or in serious work. Other times, memes that include humans could be all you need to bring humour into your posts.
4. Build Relationships
This is closely related to being human and social, as discussed above. While you might and should be involved in building your followings on social media, what you should concentrate more is on building relationships. It is said that having 100 followers who engage in your posts is better than 1000 followers who don’t care about what you post.
Now, there are many ways brands can form relationships. One of the ways is to ask questions through your posts, tag people to reference them in your posts, answer people’s questions, reply when someone mentions you in their posts or share your contents. Some
brands even go ahead to use hashtags that their followers can relate to and use in their posts.
5. Be Active
This does not necessarily mean that you have to be online all day long. Ensure you post consistently.
Most times, brands have an editorial calendar that helps them post what and when it is best. An editorial calendar can be an application that allows you to fine-tune each of your posts to suit each social media platform you are posting on, the time you post to maximize engagement and avoid repeating the same content over and over again.
Here, what you want to do is not be seen as that brand who isn’t consistent in their social media offerings.
6. Embrace Right Automation
It is unlikely not to find automation in all ranges of marketing these days, and that is fine. Where problems occur is when things such as replies to people’s comments are also automated.
For instance, while it is advisable to automate posting, you want to ensure that you reply every comment individually.
7. Focus on Helping
Your focus at the end of the day is to make sales, and everyone gets that, however, it is hard to build a brand that people buy from if all the brand does is push selling contents on social media. The exception to that is if you are into e-commerce – even at that, there is a limit.
So, more than anything, ensure that you portray your brand as one who is genuinely interested in meeting the needs of your followers. That way, they trust you, and people only buy from those they trust.
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