How to Be on Your A-Game on Social Media Platforms

Everyone’s using it nowadays and it’s a great channel to gather leads, nurture prospects, and offer updates to your customers. Can you guess what it is?

It’s social media, which has slowly, but surely made its way into all our lives. It’s difficult to remember a moment in time in which social media was not used. Some small and shy steps have led to it becoming quite an essential part of our lives.

Whether you use social media to communicate with your friends or family via a messenger service, or leverage its marketing abilities to promote your business, it’s likely you use it in one form or another. In addition, it has gotten easier than ever before to use social media platforms for efficient communication with vast audiences, making it an efficient way to grow a brand.

Social media incorporates a number of platforms which all have different uses and are ever-changing. These changes can include alterations to design details or functionality.

You may ask yourself what the benefits of being on your “A” game on social media are. We can tell you right off the bat that it’s not just about being eye-catching - after all, you don’t want to get your 15 minutes of fame and be forgotten. This is why you need this simple, yet effective “how-to” guide, so you can get your game going strong right from the beginning.

Without any further ado, here is what you need to do to create a strong social media presence:

1. Put Together a Strategy

Like many other things in life, not having a strategy may produce a chaotic journey. This particularly might not be what you want for your business, especially since social media has become more than just a place to post every now and then just for the sake of having something on your feed.

If you are a business owner, or if you just want to share your thoughts, you need to figure out your goals and how they can be utilized to create content tailored to your targeted audience. By figuring out your goals, you can also figure out the best tactical set-up, which is where your target audience comes into place.

When starting your strategy, you should take ask the following questions about your audience:

• What’s their demographic profile? Here you can consider anything from age to gender, education, or even location. You wouldn’t be advertising back pain lotions to a really young crowd, right? In the same way, your social media presence should be created for those who would want to buy your product or service.
• What are their interests? Do they want posts about a specific subject, or reviews, or something else that you can provide and catch their attention?
• Why do they turn towards this type of content? Do they just want to be up to date with certain trends, do they want to grow from a personal or professional perspective, or do they just want a video to play in the background while they are busy doing something else?
• How do they consume content?  Do they prefer videos, reels, articles, or polls? You cannot entertain them if you provide videos when they might want to read something instead.

Here’s an example of a Buyer Persona profile for Emma the Executive that offers a clear overview of internal and external motivations of the ideal customer.

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Depending on your specific goals, there are more questions that can be asked to help better determine what exactly needs to be done for an audience. However, the points mentioned above provide a great general template to have a better understanding of your page’s goals.

2. Choose Your Platform(s)

There are lots of social media platforms out there and joining all of them at the same time might become overwhelming and chaotic. Social media helps increase exposure, but knowing which platforms to use and how to operate them gives you a better opportunity to use them to their full potential.

This is why you need to choose your platforms accordingly, depending again on your audience and your “wow factor.”

For example, if you like editing videos more than writing articles, or you are able to express more through a 1-minute video than a 5-minute read, then Youtube might be a good fit for you. Instagram or Facebook could also be good options.

It’s also worth mentioning that the advertising on these platforms can be user-customized, which might also help you keep your A-game going. Paid advertising is important because all social media platforms have millions of users, and competition might therefore become rather fierce in terms of exposure: using paid ads is a good way to help boost your exposure.

If you have that “I can express myself in a few words and make it memorable” kind of thing going on, or if you want to post about breaking news or other important announcements and need that factor of urgency, Twitter might end up being your best social media option; users on this platform are usually looking for content that is text-based, but accompanying images might support your writing as well.

Of course, you can choose to not limit yourself to only one, two, three, or four...teen platforms, but it is important to keep in mind that you will have to divide your time appropriately and provide tailored, relevant content on each of them.

However, some good news is that you no longer have to do all of this manually, as there are several social media management tools that can help you share content on all your profiles from one place.

3. Figure Out When to Post

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Time is for social media posting what golden hour is for selfies, so choosing the best time to share a post can bring it more visibility than posting it randomly. The best part about this is that you do not need anything else except your audience to prepare: their behavior will give you all the hints that you need in order to figure out exactly when you should be posting.

However, it’s important to understand that accurate, effective timing depends on what you have to promote: if we are talking news, you might want to “always be on the watch and move” in order to always deliver the newest stories to your audience. In this situation, isn’t really a recipe for the perfect posting hour: you break the news as it appears, be it at 5 in the morning or 11 at night.

On the other hand, if your content is designated for people who work a 9-5 job, you might want to post either early in the morning or later in the evening during typical commute times. Lunch breaks could also be considered in this situation.

4. Consider Your Followers

Let’s imagine the following: you have to choose between two pages: one has a lot of followers, good reviews, and quite a few posts, and the other has less than 100 followers, no reviews, and some scattered posts from the previous year. Are you going to trust and choose the business that has proven results, as is showcased by their social media presence, or are you going to take a chance on the other business?

Stepping up your game by having engaging content and an active social media presence can influence people to come repeatedly visit and not ignore your page. For example, National Geographic, which has 150 million followers on Instagram, is aware of this strategy, and has put it to good use. Instagram is the perfect platform for National Geographic because it is primarily visual, and therefore plays to the brand’s strengths: creating engaging, share-worthy images and videos. This awareness and effective implementation have created a successful social media presence with impressive longevity.

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Social media is all about establishing connections with audiences through customer-centred content. This can involve replying to comments and messages as soon as possible, as well as responding to both positive and negative comments; without a doubt, doing these things will help build trust with an audience. In addition, encouraging users to show their satisfaction through reviews, or by launching campaigns that concentrate on user experiences, can help make the most of these positive relationships.

Conclusion

Social media has become a powerful instrument in the last few years. Having only a basic strategy in mind without taking into consideration a variety of important factors is not enough. Hopefully the tricks mentioned in this blog will help you figure out exactly how to deepen your social media strategy.

Being on your social media A-game will take a lot of connecting with your audience, but following my tips above will save you a lot of time and keep you at a distance from “finding the needle in a haystack” strategies, allowing you to leave all your competitors behind!