In today’s world, you can’t deny the relevance of social media. Whether you’re a business or an individual, social media is a way you can stay connected and interact with the world around you.
Needless to say, social media marketing is a key component of any marketing strategy. According to DreamGrow statistics, 95% online adults aged 18-34 are most likely to follow a brand via social networking.
So bottomline is: it is imperative to have an online presence. Why?
- Increasing brand awareness
- Engaging your customers
- Boosting SEO and traffic to your website
Now let’s take a look at how you can build and maintain a social media presence. There are two steps to an efficient social media marketing strategy:
- Creating visuals
- Promoting these visuals on social media
There are many strategies out there to increase your brand’s social media impact. However, if you take a look at the content of today’s top bloggers, you’ll see that visuals also play a significant role. In this article, I’ll touch on how to create social media visuals, and then dive deep into how to leverage visuals to drive your social media presence.
Creating visuals
90% of the information sent to your brain is visual, which is why we are visual learners. Your customers tend to remember images more easily, which is why communicating and engaging them with visual content is a must.
The visuals you create should definitely be eye-catching, but make sure they are relevant to the content you post along with it. We shared a post titled “7 Apps to Create the Best Instagram Photo” earlier on our blog, and this was the visual we shared on social media along with it:
We added in a high quality stock photo with Instagram loaded on a screen in the background, and the text overlay on top was concise and clearly visible.
We use our in-app visual editor to create and tailor images for each social profile. Venngage is an awesome tool when it comes to making infographics, social media graphics and more.
Promoting visuals on social media
After you create a visual, the next step is to use social media to get the word out there and promote your brand. There are close to 2.5 billion people using social media today…that’s one-third of the world’s population!
The graph below depicts the number of social media users worldwide (in billions):
As you can see, the number of active social media users is only going to increase with time. So social media is a brilliant platform to engage and connect with customers of all ages, worldwide.
Now that we have established why social media is an important channel to target your audience, let’s go over how you can best promote your visuals on social media to get maximum results. You can also your social media content to connect with influencers, who can then help you create even better content!
1. Automate social media posting
Like I mentioned before, it is important to have a constant online presence to keep your customers engaged. Many businesses realize that, but end up spending way too much time creating and promoting posts on social media.
According to Social Media Today, 43% small business spend 6 or more hours a week on social media.
Here’s a word cloud showing what businesses spend most time on and what is least consuming:
As we can see, finding content and posting on social media takes up most of their time. How do you decrease the time spent on social media, but make sure you still drive traffic to your website?
The solution: a social media marketing tool. Tools like Kontentino, Viraltag, Buffer, Hootsuite, etc. help you automate social media marketing and reduce the time spent on social media by at least 4-5 hours each week.
Finding content to post is not always easy. There are times you run out of content to post and looking for new content to keep your audience engaged becomes a daunting task. With Viraltag’s in-app content library, you can look for posts that match your interests and share them with your audience, complementing your original content.
Recycling your old content is a smart way to make sure you never run out of content to post and get maximum mileage from your best performing posts.
With this feature, you can put your social media marketing efforts on autopilot! Just build your Evergreen content library and Viraltag will automatically recycle the posts for you, saving time and increasing traffic!
Creating a marketing strategy to promote your ebook? This guide on how to market your ebook might help.
2. Decide which social media platforms you should focus on
There are plenty of social media platforms out there that you can post on, but it’s better to focus on that are relevant to your industry, and grow your reach there, rather than being present everywhere. This way you can more effectively manage your social profiles and target a niche audience. A social media management tool can also help make this easier.
Here are 3 things you need to consider when deciding which social channels you should focus on:
- Target audience demographics (gender, age groups, etc.)
- Type of audience (working professionals, bloggers, etc.)
- What your industry deals with (fashion, digital marketing, etc.)
Keeping them in mind, here’s an infographic we’ve made for you to see which social media channel will best fit your interests.
3. How often should you post to social media?
Once you’ve decided which social channels you want to focus on, the next step is to determine how often, and at what times during the day you should post to each of these profiles to get maximum engagement.
Buffer, CoSchedule and Loise Myers have researched posting on social media thoroughly, to find out what the ideal time to post on each social profile is, and what your frequency of posting should be.
Here’s an infographic we’ve put together an infographic based on what they found:
Based on this, it’s easy to set-up a posting schedule according to the times suggested for maximum engagement. For example here’s our posting schedule for LinkedIn:
You can keep adding content to your queue, and Viraltag will automatically fill up those time slots for you, making sure you don’t compromise your posting frequency.
Also, remember to identify and track metrics for each social media platform. This will help you make smart social media strategy decisions.
Here’s summing up what I’ve mentioned so far:
- Create visuals that are both captivating and relevant
- Promote these visuals on specific social media channels based on your target audience, and automate posting to them at times during the day when they have maximum engagement
Do give the tips mentioned in this article a go, and let us know if it helps boost your social media strategy in the comments below.