A Practical Approach to Building Your Social Media Presence

Social media has become a marketing phenomenon. Whether you’re the manager of a big-name brand or just a small indie studio looking for a bit more exposure, social media is a one-size-fits-all solution that can be taken advantage of regardless of your budget. Unfortunately, as powerful as social media is, it can also offer virtually zero results if you’re not prepared.

Many big brands hire social media managers and community representatives to operate their social media accounts. This is because these large companies typically receive hundreds if not thousands of mentions and messages on social media throughout the day, meaning they need to manage far more than what a smaller company would go through. However, if you’re just a humble startup or an SME then you might be able to assign an existing employee to manage your social media accounts or even do it yourself.

So in this article, we’re going to talk about a couple of practical ways to build your social media presence without relying on a huge amount of capital

Identify what platforms suit your needs

Unless you have a member of staff dedicated to social media, there’s a good chance that you’re going to need to pick the right social media platform for your needs. Here are the current choices that most businesses use and the advantages of each:

• Facebook – As the largest social media platform in the world with billions of daily users, it’s widely used and easily recognized by everyone around the world. It supports a wide variety of media types such as pictures and videos, and it can support plenty of different advertising options as well.
• Instagram – Although heavily image-focused, Instagram is the perfect social media platform for creative types and fashion-based businesses.
• Twitter – Excellent for short-form messages and news updates, but also supports images and videos as long as they’re kept short. Excellent for general use and also great to see what’s currently trending in the world.
• LinkedIn – A platform dedicated to business professionals. This isn’t as widely used by consumers but can be a great way to connect with other businesses and find clients if you offer professional-grade services.
• Pinterest – Not as well-known as Instagram, but Pinterest can still be a fantastic way to connect with specialized audiences by using eye-catching images.
• YouTube – While YouTube is difficult to use as a social media platform alone, it can be used to supplement your existing social media presence by extending your short-form videos into longer pieces.

Make sure you pick and choose your social media platforms carefully and expand only when you’re easily able to manage one platform.

Be consistent with social media

There’s nothing worse than a customer visiting your social media pages, only to see that you’ve not made a post for over a week. This signifies that your business is either failing or just not in touch with the community and your audience.

Make sure you’re consistent with social media posts. This is one of the most important components of growing your social media presence and it’s an easy way to ensure that you get plenty of attention from your audience and influencers. Even if it’s just a post to wish everyone a happy Friday or to remind your audience about your products, consistent posting is better than leaving gaps that span several days.

Use video content when possible

Video content is king when it comes to platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. They’re highly visually-oriented platforms which means that pictures and videos speak louder and clearer than text. If you’ve ever wondered how great marketing and promotional videos can you get you new clients, then we’ve linked an informative article that shows some brilliant statistics. For example, around 54% of all consumers want to see video content from a brand or business they support and website visitors will typically spend about 88% more time on a website if there’s a video.

Small, short and snappy videos are key when it comes to exposing your brand to social media. If you don’t think you’re capable of making videos on your own, then you may want to consider looking at social media for some inspiration or even consider hiring a video production specialist to assist you. There’s a lot that you can convey using videos, so make sure you take advantage of this medium.

Be a human, not a brand

Social media accounts are ultimately managed by human beings. This means that it’s perfectly fine for your social media manager to respond to questions, give witty responses and ultimately create a personality for your social media accounts. This can even be transferred or even inspired by the message that your brand wants to show. A great example of this is the Wendy’s social media account which often posts witty comments and is incredibly popular among the social media audience.

Showing a human side of your brand, talking to others on social media and responding to questions and concerns is an honest approach to building your social media presence. People want a brand that they can connect with and this occasionally means offering a personal touch to your social media interactions that separate you from being just a corporation or a business that speaks in a robotic and boring tone. The more you act like a real human on social media, the larger the audience you’ll draw.

Some final words

As you may have noticed, there are no real set-in-stone rules to follow when it comes to building a social media presence. The reality is that you need to go with the flow, see what’s popular or trending and find your own way around social media.

Be it Instagram’s image-focused nature, Twitter’s short and snappy messages or Facebook’s wide variety of content and advertising choices, social media is an important platform to take advantage of if you want to grow your business. Unfortunately, growing your presence will take practice and you’ll need to learn to identify brand-building opportunities in order to truly make use of social media for your business.