Social media has become one of the best ways to market yourself and your business. The reach social media marketing offers is very impressive if utilised properly. Here are a few ways you can optimise your social media presence for marketing purposes:
1. Know your audience
The first step is to know who you are trying to target. Using analytics features can help you narrow down who your current audience is and where there are gaps so that you can try to cater to those people. One way to grasp this is for you to build yourself an audience avatar, someone specific so you can create content around their likes
2. Plan your content
With your audience in mind, it is time to create and plan content for them. Look back at what has garnered positive engagement in the past and the times these occurred to help you better streamline your content to your audience. Laying out plans for your posts can help you structure what kind of content to post at what time, e.g. images, blogs, links
3. Have clear goals
With every post, it helps to have a goal. What do you want this post to do for your business? Do you want likes? New followers? Interaction from clients? Whatever it is, make sure you yourself know what outcome you desire.
4. Timeline and schedule
When creating your content plan, it is important to have a timeline and schedule in place. Based on data gathered about audience, content type and your goals for the posts you can then create an effective timeline and schedule, whether you want that to be weekly or monthly planning, daily posting or bi-weekly, etc. Each element of planning is relevant to planning this section.
5. Resources/Budget plan
In your timeline and schedule, it is important to note and resources or budgetary requirements this marketing format will need. If you don’t have a social media officer or graphic designer to contribute to the posts, you’ll need to consider hiring or outsourcing for content. You should also consider how you want your social media post distributed, do you want to pay for a program to help automate your posts? There are some costs that you wouldn’t normally consider for social media so it is necessary to plan extensively.
