Optimize Your Social Media through Trial and Error

Hiring a full-time social media guru isn’t in the cards for most small businesses, and chances are, you’re among these businesses that just can’t swing a dedicated hire for social media management purposes. What you can do, however, is improve your own skills with social media to help make it as effective for your business as possible.

After all, who better to share about your business and its services than you, the one with a unique perspective and familiarity with what you have to offer? By using social media, you can directly communicate with your audience to share your message in the most effective way.

However, determining what the most effective way is will require some trial and error.

Let’s talk through a few things that you need to determine to help optimize your business’ social media usage, including some tools and practices that will prove useful.

Plan Your Posts Strategically

When it comes to your overall activity on social media, it’s important to know what your goals are. What purpose do you want your social media to serve? Do you want to grow your audience, generate more leads, increase your engagement levels, or convert existing leads into clientele? The answer to these questions will impact what your overall social media content strategy looks like, especially in terms of the information you share and the calls-to-action you incorporate into your posts.

Really, what you should do is apply the SMART goal formula to your social media ambitions. Whatever your desired outcome, you need to be specific about it, framing it in an attainable and measurable way, ensuring that it is relevant to your larger objectives and that you have set a firm schedule to control the time it takes to accomplish. It isn’t, “I want to get more followers,” it’s “I want to gain 25 new followers and 5 new unique visitors to my website from social media within 30 days.”

It’s also important that you remain focused on the metrics that actually matter. While followers and likes are helpful to your efforts, your engagement and conversion rates are far more impactful to your business’ success.

Leave Them Wanting More

Common sense may tell you that the more you post on your social media, the more likely it is that your followers will see—and thereby, interact with—your content and brand. This, however, is not the case. Most people aren’t on social media to be advertised to, after all, so posting too much could potentially frustrate and alienate the audience you’ve built, potentially prompting them to unlike or even block your business’ page. The appropriate number of posts per platform each week depends on the platform you’re considering, and as changes are made to the algorithm, this number is apt to change.

Similarly, holding back some information and linking back to your website can help entice your social media followers to investigate further, visiting your website and absorbing the messages you’ve shared there as well. This also gives you the opportunity to collect more of their information in exchange for deliverables and the like, something that social media cannot do alone.

Use Social Media to Socialize

Social media is all about connectivity, so why is it that a member of your target audience would be interested in connecting with you online? Being able to identify the information that is being sought out, and then share it in a way that remains relevant, but still interesting, is critical. Unlike your website, which is predominantly a way to publicize what your company is capable of, your social media is the opportunity to digitally rub elbows with the people you hope to onboard as clients. Tagging different people and organizations, opening up a dialog in your comments, sharing content that’s relevant to your industry, and more can all help attract prospects to your page and keep them there. Reciprocate likes and follows, interacting with your clients’ and prospects’ pages to assist them with their own social media efforts.

Meanwhile, you need to avoid being overly “salesy” or promotional with your social media posts. Not only will most of your prospects see right through these efforts, the social media platform itself could ultimately penalize you for this kind of activity. Focus on engaging with your following and building trust, first, and allowing them to investigate your services themselves.

Use the Platform’s Capabilities to Your Advantage

Today’s social media platforms have a lot of features baked into them that can help you introduce your business and brand to more people. Sharing capabilities mean that you can take high-value posts from your business’ profile and spread them to a wider audience by sharing them from your personal one, and your team members can do the same. This is also a great way to judge if your content is living up to your expectations—if it isn’t something you want to share, why would somebody without a vested interest in doing so? 

Hashtags are used across numerous platforms to help link content based on the topic being discussed, giving you the opportunity to connect to larger ideas and form a cohesive campaign.

Identify What Provides the Most Value to You When Shared

Your website should have plenty of useful content, from your blogs to your service pages to your deliverables. Don’t limit yourself to only sharing a blog article, and don’t be afraid to reshare content if it’s been a while since you last posted it. This helps to ensure your followers have the best chance of seeing it, whether they missed it the first time, are new followers, or simply need the reinforcement.

While Social Media Seems Simple, Using It Right Can Be a Challenge

Whichever platform you’re considering, social media can be intensely powerful, so long as you use it correctly… or enlist someone to help you do so. Large businesses hire marketers specifically to handle their social media presences in order to reach their audience in a way that other, more traditional forms of marketing just can’t… making it all the more important that you have a resource to help you accomplish the same in your business.