Social media is one of the most attractive places for individuals, brands, and businesses to focus their efforts today. With more than 2 billion users on Facebook, and another billion-plus on other networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, there are just too many opportunities to not take advantage of.
With this in mind, it’s also a very competitive and cluttered space. While there are already more than a billion active websites on the internet today creating content, just imagine how many tweets, updates, photo uploads, and everything in between take place every second.
What this means is that every person and brand that wants to build a social following, needs to know how to approach their content creation, marketing efforts, and engagement in the best way possible. Today we are going to look at some of the best working methods out there today.
Make Your Brand Flow with Your Social Profiles
One of the most important things a brand can do when getting active on social media, is putting in the time and effort to make sure their social profile looks like their main website, and represents the same colors and logo designs of their brand.
Platforms like Twitter and Facebook will provide users with a default template when they first create their profile, but the option is there to also change background colors, upload a profile image or logo, and also create a custom cover or background image.
When trying to build a brand or business online, it’s important to make sure your branding always looks the same. While you might think it’s easy and obvious for someone to tell the difference between a website and social media, just think about how many websites and social profiles your audience and customers might be sitting on a daily basis. This is a simple yet effective implementation that every brand should use.
Coca-cola is continually one of the best brands at doing this. Just take a look at their Twitter page below.
Have a Social Following that Grows Daily
When looking at your social following, it can be quite intimidating to see you starting off with that big ‘0’, but don’t worry — this will slowly increase on a daily basis. This is something every social user needs to go through, but there are also many ways to increase your following and reach on a daily basis.
Through the use of an actively blogging and updating your social accounts with new statuses and shareable content are a few of the most effective ways for increasing your following count. At the same time you will also want to be sharing valuable content with your audience might also share. Once this happens, you will start to see an increase in social followers, which could then turn into a successful social campaign and continually bring in new users as others continue to share it with their audiences.
One of the most important things to remind yourself when using social media, is that numbers aren’t the most important thing. Quality over quantity is more important, and we all know that Twitter and Facebook and other social platforms are loaded with fake bought accounts which provide no value at all.
Sites like TwitterCounter make the process of tracking followers and unfollowers more visual. Be sure to plug your social profile into their site and see how your charts look.
Create Unique and Shareable Content
As referenced in the previous point, shareable content is an excellent way to not only create content for your brand to provide value to your audience, but it’s also great for increasing social activity and engagement among your followers.
We are now in the world where visual and audio content is king. With attention spans now at just 3 seconds and social media blasting everyone with thousands of updates daily, it’s important to make sure that your content is getting noticed and shared in the process.
A perfect example of this would be to create an infographic which you can host on your site, but you can also promote through social media. When promoting an infographic through social media, be sure to make a custom thumbnail, screenshot or graphic of it which highlights the best parts. This will allow your audience to see the best elements of it through social media and hopefully click on it to end up on your site.
Social Media is a Winning Strategy
We all know that there are billions of users on social media, and thousands of companies have mastered the art of building a business around this audience. If you are still struggling to find success with social media, it’s simply a matter of going back to the drawing board and looking what you currently have in place. Your audience is following you for a reason, not reflect back and see what type of value you can provide to them.