How to Build a Robust Social Media Presence? - Raheem Dad

If you want to gain exposure, enhance your brand identity and want to build a strong connection with your users, you cannot deny the importance of social media.

Social media has become an integral part of businesses nowadays, and it should be in your arsenal; otherwise, you are leaving money on the table.

When it comes to using social media for enhancing your business activities, you need to be extra agile and ahead of the game. Everybody knows a robust social media presence can do a world of good in boosting your business operations.

I have seen many big companies not taking advantage of social media’s full potential, although they are on social media but lack a solid and strong plan or strategy. So, without wasting time, let’s start by telling you how you can make a strong presence on social media platforms.

Note: This blog is for all those who lack the social media frontier but want to make it large on the bigger arena and cash the endless opportunities social media brings with it.

Identifying Your Problems

You cannot solve a problem if you can’t point it out or don’t know what it actually is. So, it is good to start off by analysing your current strategy and conduct a rigorous audit of where you stand. Note down your current standings, your aims, ongoing activities and possible debacles coming your way.

Do you know your audience? And what are their expectations? Are you fulfilling them? Are you reaching them from all leading social media profiles?

Don’t forget to assess what your competitors are doing. See how they are doing it, pick the positives from them and implement it in your strategy. There is no shame in peeking what others are doing, and you can get a lot of positives from those who are doing well.

Set Goals for Yourself

The second step is actually quite important. Have you set for yourself goals like achieving a certain number of subscribers or followers in a given time? Make sure that the goals you set are specific, realistic and can be achieved.

For instance, if you plan to increase Facebook followers by 10% in a month. This is realistic, measurable achievable as well as time-bound. Everything is clear from this goal, and you have one month to accomplish it.

Make Sure You Know Your Audience

By focusing on your audience will make your job easy. One thing to keep in mind is that your product or service is not for everyone, so there is no need to make everyone happy. Get to know your audience because your services are directed at a certain section of people.

Get a close look at your buyers’ personas and identify their needs, challenges, problems, likes and dislikes. By knowing all these attributes, you are well prepared to launch a strategy that is directed towards your audience.

It will also give you an idea about which social media platform is doing great for you and which medium needs your attention more. You will have an idea or what kind of content to prepare. For instance, if you are short of attention on Instagram, craft some eye-catching imagery related to your product to grab people’s attention and show them clearly what you have enstored for them.

Examine Your Competitors or Market Leaders

It’s not all about your audience; take a sneak peek into your competitors' functioning as well. You can go with a strategy formed just to check how well you are doing as compared to your competitors. Check to see which posts gave you fruitful results and which didn’t achieve any attention.

This will give you a clear idea of what you need to do and what your rivals are doing, better than you. If you are doing a campaign for a restaurant or a clothing brand, check the sources of popular mentions. Not only this, you will have to analyse the audience of social media influencers too.

Create Lasting Relationships

Creating a fruitful social media presence has its foundation in ‘being social’. Experts are of the view that it is way better to have 500 engaged followers than 5000 followers who aren’t keen followers of your content and don’t interact with your posts.

Having more followers or subscribers is just a vanity metric. The real results are gained when you have real followers. When I say real, I mean it.

I was talking to a social media expert based in Bradford, and these were his tips for building customer engagement on different platforms:

• Answer whatever question your audience asks you.
• Give a courteous reply to those who mentioned your brand or shared your content with others.
• Mention and tag those who you include in your posts as reference.
• Reply smartly to comment or inbox message, even if it is a negative one.
• Accept the feedback; negative of positive

Make a Social Calendar

An editorial or social calendar brings in the consistency to your social media campaign, which leads you to success. It has other benefits associated with it as well.

With an editorial calendar, you will be able to balance all social networks. There won’t be any chance to miss out on any network. You can broadcast your content across all platforms according to your needs, and the results can also be compiled easily.

A content calendar helps you save time as it will help you automate some processes.

Although creating a social calendar can be time-consuming but once created, you will be able to overview all posts in one place. Scheduling posts and statuses in advance will also give you peace of mind.

Clients Require Help. Be There!

Relying only on selling and boosting ROI from the word go can go and not focusing on giving helpful advice and to your audience won’t do you any good in the long wrong. They want your help, be a solution to their problems.

How to be Helpful and Friendly

Reply to all comments and messages which need to be answered. Your followers expect it as soon as possible. Managing all social media channels and then replying to all comments and messages is not an easy thing to do. However, there are a number of tools that enable you to see all the channels in one dashboard.

One thing to be mindful of is that time is the key to a solid relationship. 32% of people on social media expect you to reply in the first 30 minutes of their queries or feedback, whereas 42% are expecting you to reply to them in 60 minutes.

Whether you answer within this time or not, make sure you do reply even if it after 6 hours. Better late than never. People love when their brands reply to their texts or comments, when someone hears them, is willing to help them and is there for them.

This way, they will spread the positive word about your brand to others. Don’t neglect this factor.

On the other hand, if your followers are talking about something that is confusing them, you can use your content marketing to clear their confusions and answer whatever questions they have in mind. They will appreciate it pretty much, and you will be scoring wonderful on the SEO frontier.

Enhance your presence on social media

Why? It’s the need of the time. Do it now; otherwise, you will be chasing your competitors.

Frankly saying, social media optimisation is quite simple and easy in contrast to SEO optimisation. However, to make your campaign a successful one and reap the rewards to the fullest, you need to be mindful of key ingredients involved in social media profiles, pages and presence.

Let me suggest some important things.

Set the same profile picture on all social media channels. In most cases, the profile picture will be your company logo. This will help your audience recognise you. They will know that they are dealing with one service provider/business, regardless of the social channel.

Include your company’s website/app link or other social media buttons, your company’s hashtag or your primary keyword, which describes your business and is yielding beneficial results.

Be smart with your posts. Don’t go all out and neither be sluggish. Your main priority is the people for whom you are posting. Establish yourself as an authority in the industry you are operating by sharing content related to your niche.

Ignite engagement and discussion amongst masses and show your expertise. Your audience will turn to you for consultation next time they need something related to your industry.

Spice Up Your Content

I have seen many brands posting the same type of content time and again. Make sure you don’t do it. People get bored by seeing the same things continuously. They want change, they want something different, something interesting every time; give it to them.

Go through your previous posts and see which of them produced great results. Also, go through your competitors’ posts and see what kind of content they are creating. Try to emulate such content.

You can also use a tool here which tells you your most famous posts ranked by the number of likes, comments and shares. This will help you know what resonates with your followers. This is the type of content that your audience like. Take a leaf out of it.

Make sure your content is unique and not copied. Also, all social media channels require different sorts of content. One size fits all mantra doesn’t fit here.

Be There for Them

Once your social media gets rolling, you can’t take an eye from it. Stay active. People expect you to be present 24/7, and this is what successful businesses do. A query, confusion or anything can be directed towards you any time of the day.

Try to post continuously. Don’t go like 5 posts in one day and nothing in the next couple of days. Being inactive is unprofessional, especially when you are operating beyond borders. It’s as simple as that.

Be Human

Your social media presence is your best chance to create a positive impact on your brand in front of your audience. Deal with your subscribers or clients humanly. Show them your brand persona. Show them how you care for them. Show them that you are here for them.

I mean who wants to follow a characterless, emotionless, business who doesn’t deal with its clients in a nice way. Show your human face, show some humour, some emotions. Show your wit and funny side by cracking a decent joke, make the people relate to it, invoke feelings like childhood memories, etc.

There’s no need to do it every day, but be regular in your approach.

Final Words

In my view, a successful social media campaign is doing small things the right way. All small things, when combined, will enable you to make it large and become big. Remember that social media success and social branding is all about patience. Patience is the name of the game.

Your main task is to create and raise engagement; it could be anyway. Know your audience, and there are no hard and fast rules on how you should do it. Go out of the box but be realistic. Don’t be afraid to change, if it doesn’t work.

Cash in the humongous opportunity social media presents us with.