It’s time to face this fact: It’s pretty much impossible to expand your ecommerce efforts without engaging in the social media ecosystem.
While you may not consider social media a core sales channel, customers will still leverage social to check out product/business reviews or learn more about your brand, both of which can influence their purchase decision.
Here is a little food for thought:
– Over 80% of customers’ buying decisions are influenced by social posts from their friends or connections.
– Over 55% of customers say that social images and videos have some influence while online shopping.
– Conversions skyrocket over 130% when positive reviews are seen on mobile devices.
Now, we are not saying that you need to switch gears and spend all day every day only focusing on social media. However, building up your following on social media can expand the reach and influence you have in helping customers along their journey from consideration to dedicated brand advocate.
So let’s look at just a few strategies you can use to improve your social media following, visibility, and overall impact.
It Still Comes Down to Content
You knew this was coming, so let’s just get it out of the way.
Without content, you have nothing.
Social media’s engine (so to speak) revolves around content, which comes in many forms, video, images, article links, polls, memes, gifs, and the list goes on – and also varies from platform to platform.
The through line when it comes to your content is your style and brand voice.
Posting content that is completely unrelated to your brand or business can quickly confuse or even turn off your followers.
For example, National Positions’ social channels are filled with articles, case studies, marketing tips and tricks—you get the idea. On our Instagram, we also pepper in content about our team members, but we never post about random news stories surrounding politics or scientific discoveries because this does not align with our brand or mission as an organization.
But let’s say you sell tires.
There is a mass of content that you could create and share on social media (a blog post on the best tires for specific vehicles, a video sharing tips for when a person needs new tires, etc.). Or you could even do a live stream on a social platform about driving safely in precarious weather conditions. Whatever your business, you have options, but you need to get started with creating content ASAP.
Don’t worry about perfection—you will learn how to make better content as time goes on.
Stay Consistent—Consistently
When building your following on social media, staying consistent with content and updates is just as important as the content and updates themselves.
We’ve seen this time and time again—a client jumps into social full steam only to get burned out after a week of posting because it “isn’t working.” Building a following takes time and patience.
Commit to posting once a day to start.
Depending on who you listen to, some will live by posting 8-9 times a day at minimum, which, to be honest, isn’t that big of an ask if you consider posting to Instagram Stories, for example, which can be done on the fly with zero preparation.
When it comes down to it, the “right” amount of daily posting onto your Instagram or Facebook feed will come from your own testing and analysis.
But staying consistent will slowly but surely indicate to your growing followers that they can look forward to something new from your brand each and every day. As you get into a rhythm and start gaining traction, you will come up with new ideas, and you can start ramping up your daily posting frequency.
Posting content once a week or once a month will be akin to not posting content at all, so dedicate your time to posting consistently.
There is a caveat to this, however.
If, for example, you are regularly doing a podcast or contest, these are totally fine to push out once a week (instead of daily). You don’t need to share a huge announcement or have a contest running every day, and frankly, this is just not sustainable. But in between your “major posts,” make sure you have additional content lined up to fill in the rest of the week.
Test Different Content—Constantly
As mentioned previously, there are a lot of options when it comes to different types of content on social. While it is true that video seems to be the cream of the crop in terms of prized and engaging content, every brand (and audience) is different.
Consider industries like fashion, finance, home services, or education. Is one type of content going to be perfect for each? Probably not.
Fashion is highly visual, finance can be highly technical, and home services can be highly tactile.
While you should consider these types of industry attributes when creating your content, the only way you will know what will really capture your audience’s attention (and build your following) is to test.
Platforms like Facebook will provide you with basic metrics for each of your posts like reach, engagement, shares, etc. So, as you test your different content types, keep an eye on this to see what is sparking interest with your audience.
Here is an overly simplistic way to test this idea by breaking up content from week to week.
– Week One: Short-form written posts with links to your articles or features.
– Week Two: Open-ended questions relating to your industry along with an image or meme related to your question.
– Week Three: Short tips and tricks (selfie) videos with a brief written post asking for viewers to “let us know in the comments.”
– Week Four: Long-form written customer “story” telling your audience about a situation regarding an anonymous customer along with what others can learn from your experience (oh, and include some type of image as well).
You can obviously test other ideas, but these are just a few to get you started.
You can check weekly and at the end of the month to see what content seemed to get more interaction with your audience. Keep trying out new content ideas over time. Give “what worked” another go around and then change up and re-test what didn’t.
Repurposing Your Content
This actually ties in nicely with our previous tip because, let’s face it, creating fresh content every day can be exhausting.
Not every single piece of content needs to be new; changing up the presentation can give you a fast track to creating tons of content without the extra work. How? By leveraging the power of repurposing! Here is a simple example:
Let’s take our previous example of a local tire reseller.
They decide they want to provide their customers a simple list of tips to help them determine when they should get their tires replaced for the winter. So, they found a great writer to knock out a blog called “10 Ways To Know If Your Tires Are Winter Ready.” Fantastic!
Now they have one great piece of content they can post on Monday, right?
Wrong! They now have a bank of content.
They can post well over a month’s worth of daily content just from this one blog article—by intelligently repurposing. Here is how it works:
– Blog article post with link = one post.
– Each tip can be copied and pasted directly into a separate social media post (Yep, right from your blog). Pop an image in there and you are good to go = 10 more posts.
– Create a meme image for each tip, write a short description for your post, and link it back to your full article if your audience “Wants to check out all the tips” = 10 more posts.
– Do a simple 60-second video for each tip and post these = 10 more posts.
– Mix and match the above ideas.
This is just one example of repurposing content. Some business owners may feel that this is repetitive, but this is far from the truth.
Not everyone is going to read every article, video, or long-form pro tip, but different content will connect with different types of customers. And not everyone is going to see your content every day.
Sorry, this is just a fact of social media life!
Just try to mix up the content you post in between so you’re not posting the same tips back to back (for those who do regularly check your social). Spread them out, pepper in some other content (industry news, other blog posts, etc.).
The point is that if you adopt this idea of repurposing content, you can relieve some stress about what to post next. There are a minimum of five ways to use every piece of content, so don’t be afraid to get creative!
Need a Boost?
Okay, from time to time, your content may need a little “boost” (see what we did there?).
If you are not in the know, “boosting a post” is shorthand for paying for attention. You can make a post and tell Facebook that you want to put some cash behind it, and they will boost its visibility for you. This can be a good move here and there if you have some great video content or want to share a notable accolade that people need to know about.
You should not be aiming to boost every post or use it as an advertising tool (Facebook has different tools for that). But, for example, if you were hosting an open house for locals or the grand opening of a new location, boosting a post can be a good move.
An occasional boost with what you feel is a higher-value piece of content can expose you to new audiences and grow your following over time without being intrusive. You can go a step further and launch a “follow” campaign if you have some extra cash you are willing to spend, but we will save that for another blog post.
But when you are early in your social-media-follower-building journey, paying for a little boost at strategic times can’t hurt.
Many Paths to Social Media Success
We encourage you to take these ideas and tweak them for each of the social platforms you are working with, as each audience on each platform will have their preferred taste.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok—each is a slightly different (or very different) monster.
Every brand needs to start somewhere, so do some research to find where your most valuable target audience is spending their time on social, and start building content from there.
If you are not really sure where to begin, you are always welcome to contact our National Positions social media team for a little help. They can provide a completely free analysis and give you an idea of what may be the best direction for you to grow and scale your brand online.
If you want to chat with our team, you can visit our contact us page or send an email to Marketing@NationalPositions.com.
Don’t forget to check out our case studies to see some real-world social media marketing impact!