A snappy social media presence is essential for promoting your business. However, creating and maintaining one isn’t as easy as it sounds; it takes time, effort, and expertise. And it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it task. These are a few tips to help you get started.
1. Choose your platforms
With all the social media platforms available today, it would be very challenging to be present and consistent across each one. Instead of spreading yourself thin, choose the platforms you know you will be active on and best fit your brand.
Although some people think you should only choose two or three social media platforms, you should choose as many platforms as you can manage. If you can keep up with five platforms, choose five platforms that make sense for your brand. If you can only manage two platforms, that’s fine too.
2. Optimize each platform based on top recommendations
There are several big-name experts on each social media platform. Follow these experts for top recommendations on what you should be doing to maximize your impact. For example, Instagram experts say to optimize your profile bio by including a tagline, a hashtag, a link, and bullet points about your business.
3. Follow each platform’s rules
Each social media platform has its own set of rules. For instance, Facebook has a few rules for contests. If you’re hosting a contest or giveaway on Facebook, you can’t ask your audience to share the post as a way of entry. While it’s okay to ask your audience to like and comment on the post for entry, you can’t ask them to share with or tag their friends to enter.
Platform rules, especially Facebook, change regularly. Keep an eye out for rules updates and make sure you are following all of them. Failure to abide by the rules can result in the suspension of your profile.
4. Stay consistent by content batching
Staying consistent, especially on multiple platforms, can be difficult and time-consuming. Relieve stress by content batching your posts on each platform. Content batching for social media is when you create multiple posts at a time. There are several free services you can use to schedule your content. Be sure to leave room in your content schedule for extra posts in case you want to address a topical issue.
5. Stay branded
Your brand is your image and reflects your reputation. Stay branded across your social media platforms by using your brand colors on images, rotating post templates, and consistently posting content that your audience will be interested in. Each time a member of your audience visits a new social media platform, he should be able to tell that it’s your profile by the content shared on it.
With that said, don’t always publish the same posts on the same days on each of your platforms. There are a few reasons not to do this. One, posting the same thing on each platform can be boring for your audience. Two, each platform has different recommended dimensions for images. Therefore, posting an image optimized for Instagram to Facebook or Twitter isn’t the best practice.
6. Learn the best times to post for your audience
After you’ve been present on social media for a while and published posts on a consistent basis, you should be able to use each platform’s analytics to learn the best time to post for your audience. Once you do, post during those times and days to maximize your engagement. This helps grow your social media presence organically.
7. Do NOT pay for followers
Paying for followers could be one of the worst things you could do on social media. Buying followers causes low engagement rates, inaccurate audiences, lowers your credibility and could suspend your account. In the end, it’s better to earn followers organically.
8. Collaborate with experts who have the same audience as you
Collaborating with other experts who have a similar audience is great when you’re starting out, and it’s something you should continue to do. When you collaborate with someone on a platform, you gain access to their audience and your potential engagement doubles or even triples, especially if the other account has more followers than you do. Collaborating is good on all social media platforms. However, it works especially well on YouTube.
As you can see, creating a killer social media presence for your business isn’t as simple as it sounds. A good social media presence takes hard work and dedication, but If you follow these steps, you’ll be on your way to a consistently high-performing social media presence.
Guest post courtesy of Danielle Kunkle
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