Countless businesses are communicating every day to their customers and expanding business via social media. Yet they often don’t take time out to see where their accounts can be improved. Here are 5 actionable tips for you to improve your overall social media performance.
- Always be responsive
Treat your platforms like you would a shop floor. If a customer came up to you in real life and asked you a question what would you do? Would you ignore them and walk away? More importantly, would they come back if you did?
Unlikely as that scenario sounds, on social media it happens all the time. Too regularly you see reviews, recommendations and comments unanswered or a thumbs up and nothing else. Any social media platform you are on will need a certain level of responsiveness and achieve that you must be active. Make sure that someone is monitoring notifications and responding to comments and messages as quickly as possible across all your platforms.
Bear in mind that this can be time-consuming to achieve. On Facebook, for example, you need to respond to 90% of private messages within 15 minutes, which takes dedication. Unfortunately, Instant Replies aren’t included as a response, but they are a good way of managing a customer’s expectations.
- Be consistent
So how often should you post? The answer, unfortunately, is usually more than you currently are. But what is true is that regularity and consistency is rewarded on pretty much all the platforms.
Think quality over quantity though. Two or three good quality LinkedIn posts a week that engage with your audience and are well received are much more valuable than endless posts that receive no engagement. Solid engagement is a key to success on social media and regular, top quality content will always receive more engagement than poorly thought out mass-produced content.
Makes sense really. Who wants to read rubbish?
- Stay content focused
One safe bet to quickly and easily losing followers and customers is to bombard them with “salesy and pushy” type messages. Staying social will reap more rewards than just firing off sales pitches. If a customer was in front of you it’s unlikely that you would grab something off the shelf and tell them to buy it now but on social media, that’s what many businesses have a tendency to do.
Good salespeople get to know their customer. They find out their preferences and their intentions i.e. are they ready to buy just yet, or still browsing? Then they make suggestions based on the information they have found out. Being social on your platforms will give you the same answers but only if you craft the right questions and listen to what your audience is telling you.
- Continually review your social media accounts
Plenty of businesses will take time to create their account, craft their bio then never go back to it. The focus becomes all about creating content and pushing it out. But your bio, profile, description and services sections are all highly searchable keywords and are rich opportunities to help you to be found.
When was the last time you took time out to review your accounts? Are they still relevant? Make sure that your descriptions all include the keywords that you know your customers are using to find whatever it is that you do or sell. If you have won any awards or worked with new clients or industries make sure that these are included.
- Measure then analyse your performance
One of the biggest differences between online and offline marketing is the ability and depth to which you can measure success and failures. However, a measurement for the sake of collecting numbers on a spreadsheet is no use to anyone. It only works if you use it as a basis for a deeper analysis. Saying you’ve grown in following numbers on each platform is great, but the numbers alone aren’t enough. What have you done differently to instigate this? Which post had the highest engagement? What else of your online presence changed? Signups, Traffic, etc? Analyse what has worked in the past and what hasn’t. Use a deeper analysis to help you decide what you need to do again, what you need to do differently, and when you need to do it.
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