6 Social Media Tips To Grow Your Business
Date: April 23, 2019
By: Daniel Tarasio
Have you heard that your business should be active on social media, but don’t know where to start? Here are 6 social media tips to get you going!
Click Here For The Content Schedule Template
What is Content Creation?
Content creation is an umbrella term for any post – video, podcast, photo, status, blog, tweet – on a variety of social media. It’s a subset of Marketing, and encompasses brand awareness, promotion, advertising and focuses on inbound methods. A non-direct approach at increasing profitability is more effective than traditional methods of advertising which involve reaching a broad audience as quickly as possible. Content creation is the easiest means for a company to try their hand at a modern Marketing, and the steps below can help you get started. The unwritten first guideline for content creation is identifying what the term actually means.
Wikipedia defines it like this:
Content creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content is “something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts” for self-expression, distribution, marketing and/or publication. Typical forms of content creation include maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, photography, videography, online commentary, the maintenance of social media accounts, and editing and distribution of digital media. A Pew survey described content creation as the creation of “the material people contribute to the online world.”
Gone are the days where content online was so scarce that you can just post anywhere and everyone would see it. More than half the world population currently has internet access, which means a lot more content for us to see!
If you look at YouTube, you’ll see that roughly 13 days of video are uploaded to YouTube per minute. That is 300 hours, every 60 seconds! But don’t let that number discourage you–it is still definitely worth pursuing creating content. You just need to make sure you are doing it right. Deciding on your best social media channel is vital, and this choice begins by nailing down your target market.
Here are 6 tips to help you get the most out of social media:
1. Research Your Industry
Our first social media tip is researching. Check out some of your competitors on social media to see where you could start. This will help you choose the best platforms for your company and give you some inspiration for the content itself.
2. Set Goals
Are you attempting to increase sales? Or do you simply want to establish an online presence? Figuring out why you want to try your hand at Social Media Marketing, and setting tangible goals will allow you to build an appropriate plan to reach your objective.
3. Increase Your Brand Awareness
Knowing what your company mission is and the products or services you offer can help identify the sort of content you should publish. For instance, we tout our family culture as one of our selling points. For this reason, we try to post pictures of our team at events & having fun on our social media.
Maybe blogs are the best way to get your message across, or maybe visual posts on Instagram encapsulate your product the best. It’s a good idea to uncover the best plan for your business as opposed to using one platform because you personally enjoy it.
4. Let Your Brand Shine Through
Following industry trends is a great place to start, but establishing a voice that’s unique to you and your brand is invaluable. Integrating a personal touch in all of your posts can humanize your marketing tactics and make it feel less like a promotion. Professionalism is key, and your product or service is what draws people in, but a distinctive flare in your posts can keep people interested.
5. Introduce a Schedule
Being a content creator requires constant care and attention. The consistency of your content is just as important as the quality! It is important to keep this mindset because if you do not fill this need for your audience, they will easily move on to the next provider. Having a posting schedule will help:
Allow you to maximize the success of promotions: If there is an important promotion you have coming up, you can choose to be content heavy around that time to keep your audience engaged. This will increase the success of your promotion.
Strengthen Your Brand: Take a look at companies like PETA. They are a brand that revolves around its company’s morals and values. Every post they make reinforces that they care for the well-being of all animals.
See Opportunities Everywhere: Once you start to build a habit of consistency, creating a work environment that encourages content creation will help you see opportunities for content all around you. Don’t overdo it though, if you find yourself questioning posting a piece of content, it’s sometimes best to take a to step back and evaluate if it’s important for your brand.
Building a content schedule is as simple as setting recurring reminders on your phone to get that video done, or a calendar notification to craft your daily tweet. It can be as detailed as you want, too! If you’d like a basic content schedule template, click here.
6. Keep Improving
Since social media is always updating, improving your accounts will keep you ahead of your competitors. It’s easy to build the foundation for your accounts, but if you’re planning to upload posts every month or two, you’ll slowly lose followers or subscribers. At the very least, your follower count will plateau. You need to maintain a lively feed with relevant content to keep up with social media trends. Following these content creation guidelines should give you a robust, and effective way to manage your content.
We hope you enjoyed these social media tips. If you need help filling out your content schedule or planning/creating content for your business, get in touch with us! We’d be happy to sit down with you to put a plan together that will help your business get the most out of social media!
In the next article, we will discuss using tools such as HootSuite to further automate and simplify your social media routine.
