For me social media was just another way of communicating with my friends, but for businesses it’s a lot more than tweeting what you had for breakfast. Social media today has 2 billion users worldwide and is projected to grow at a rate of 25% year on year. I’m young and like most people my age I am active on all the social media apps, and assumed I knew everything about them, but newly starting at Napier I have learnt effective social media strategies for B2B Tech companies, and how much these platforms can make a difference to their business growth.
Popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube are great ways to build a strong foundation to share content to a specific audience. There are lots of social media platforms but it’s important to look at which ones your company should be active on.
Although social media is a key part of marketing there is no need to be on every social media platform, you only need to be on the ones relevant to your business. Once you have recognised your audience think about personas and which platforms each persona might use, this will help you to identify which platforms you should be using to grow your business.
For your content to be successful you need to identify and outline your persona’s needs, wants and goals to make the content relevant; Your persona might want to learn from your content, so you will need to create educational content to meet this goal. Educational content doesn’t have to mean boring as you can also take into consideration the style in which you present the content you want to write.
To keep your audience engaged you can choose between a variety of different styles to make your content entertaining and interesting, including ‘How-to’, bulleted lists, ‘top X reasons why’, research polls and videos. These different content styles all perform differently to each other depending on your industry and the platform you choose to promote or publish with.
When your audience enjoy the content you’ve published they will engage with it by liking, sharing and retweeting. This engagement means that your content is then shared with all of their contacts, spreading your name and your message to a wider audience. With social channels this can happen quickly and this means that social media is a great tool for amplification.
When creating content, including visuals to grab attention is a must. The use of coloured visuals increases people’s willingness to read your piece of content by 80% and helps to bring traffic to your content-Hubspot. Although using your own imagery is recommended, it’s easy to get stock photos. The platform Pablo allows you create your own custom image with templates, stock photos, and text, specific to your campaign; or can use stock photos from sites such as ingimage or iStock.
Monitoring and analysing your content are the next steps to improving your social media presence; When it comes to analysing your channels you can look at metrics such as post reach, engagement and audience growth. Reach measures the size of your potential audience, engagement is used to measure the number of interactions with your brand such as, clicks, likes and shares and, audience growth is the number of new audience members you’ve attracted.