Improving your social media presence comes with plenty of benefits. If you’re going to make a website for your business, you’ll want to optimize your social media channels to drive traffic to your site. Not only that, but an increased social presence helps create brand awareness and reach new clients.
Instead of posting randomly on your social channels, look for specific ways to improve your social media presence. Here, we’ll introduce you to 13 different methods that any business can use to start increasing its presence.
What is social media presence?
Social media presence refers to how present your brand is on social media platforms. Beyond just how visible your brand is on social media channels, it also refers to how a company portrays itself through social media. This type of presence is important to the growth of your brand since it helps you establish your company’s identity and makes your brand appear more trustworthy and credible. With more trust, you can better develop a lasting relationship with your audience.
How to Increase Social Media Presence
01. Identify your social media goals
Before you begin putting any of your social media marketing plans into action, it’s important that you establish your goals. A good way to do this is to set SMART goals for specific milestones you’d like to accomplish.
Let’s take a look at how you might apply SMART goals to increasing your social media presence. As an example of a goal you might have, you might say you want to drive 20% more traffic to your website through your social channels. Setting your goal will look something like this:
Specific: Increase traffic to our website with targeted ads on Instagram.
Measurable: We’ll monitor metrics on Google Analytics to see the sources of traffic coming to our website.
Achievable: Our goal of 20% is realistic based on our budget and timeline.
Relevant: This goal will not only bring more traffic to our site but make our brand more visible on social media.
Time-bound: We’re setting ourselves a deadline to reach this goal by the end of the next quarter.
Setting your goals early on in your social media strategy will help guide you moving forward and gives purpose to each post that you upload.
02. Get to know your audience
As a brand, one of your objectives should be getting to know your audience well since this will allow you to create tailored content that’s more likely to grab their attention and gain their trust.
You want to know your end user’s interests, what social platforms they use most regularly and what problems they’re facing that your brand can help solve. An excellent way to start getting to know your clients is to create a buyer persona, which is a profile of your ideal target customer that encompasses all of these elements.
To help you get audience insights, pay attention to the metrics provided by social media channels as well as analytics dashboards, such as Google Analytics. Look at demographics, age, interests, and the platforms they use to see if there are any trends you can pick up on to fine-tune your target audience.
03. Learn how to engage your audience
Pay attention to your audience’s reactions, or lack thereof, anytime you post something on social media. Regardless of the platform it’s on, every post should have a goal of engaging your audience by having them take action. Whether that’s liking an image, watching a video, leaving a comment, or clicking on a link, you want your audience to be as engaged as possible. Pay attention to the type of content your audience finds most engaging and the content that elicits less of a response so that you learn where to focus your efforts.
A good way to increase social media engagement is to provide your audience with an easy action to complete. That could be responding to a poll in an Instagram story or leaving their questions for a Q&A session. Here’s how home design brand, Modsy, gets its audience to comment on its Instagram posts by asking them to leave a comment on which design they like best.
This engagement method is easy to recreate and it’s a great way to get your audience used to commenting on your social media posts. As a bonus, by analyzing their responses to a question like “Which do you like best,” you’re learning more about your audience’s tastes and preferences, which helps you create social media content and products they’ll love in the future.
04. Stay on brand
We’ve talked a lot about catering to your audience’s preferences on social media, but the key is finding a way to do this while still being true to your brand. Your brand’s voice and aesthetic are very important on social media, so you want to ensure that each piece of content you release is in line with your branding. Make sure that your social media branding, such as your writing voice, aesthetic, image, and messaging, is uniform across all of your channels.
05. Be authentic
Your followers want to interact with a brand that’s human and authentic. There are a lot of ways you can come across as authentic on social media. You can speak to your clients like they’re friends, you can present your employees on your social pages to give a face to your brand, talk about your brand’s beginnings and history, and admit when your company did something wrong or apologize for mistakes. A mix of these things will allow your customers to see you as human instead of just a brand, allowing them to deepen their connection with your company.
Skylar Grace, a clothing brand built on Wix, exemplifies this on its Instagram profile. The opening line, “Hey bestie! So glad ur here,” is anything but dry and stuffy and makes customers feel like they’re friends with the brand. The company’s owner, Skylar, also appears in a lot of the company’s posts in the clothes, which helps customers put a face to the brand.
06. Create a social media posting calendar
Create a social media calendar that encompasses posts across all the social platforms that you’re using. This will help you stay consistent with your posts, pre-plan any content in advance that’s seasonal or holiday-themed, and it will help you avoid posting repetitive or last-minute content.
Having a posting schedule is also a good way to map out your strategy and create and schedule content that’s aligned with your goals. Especially if you’re posting to multiple social channels, you want to make sure your content is coordinated on each platform and that you don’t have any large posting gaps.
07. Branch out to new platforms
You might start with the usual suspects like Facebook and Instagram marketing because they’re the most popular social media platforms, but once you get going, you should consider branching out to other social networks.
Once you know your audience better, you might find out they prefer long-form video content over images, so it would be in your best interest to start creating content on YouTube. Or, maybe your audience is made up of more business professionals that aren’t on apps like Tik Tok or Instagram, so you want to reach them on LinkedIn. There are a number of social media networks you might consider using, like:
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Snapchat
Tik Tok
YouTube
Instagram
Facebook
Depending on your industry, the type of content you create and your audience’s preferences, try and choose a few new platforms to test out engagement.
08. Stay relevant with current events
Audiences want to know that brands are aware of the world around them. In a study, 66% of respondents said that they want brands to take a public stand on social issues.
Many brands are hesitant to take a stance when it comes to controversial political and social issues as they don’t want to alienate any portion of their customers.
Sometimes, staying relevant with current events has nothing to do with promoting your own brand but rather showing solidarity with a movement. Nike’s “For Once, Just Don’t Do It” anti-racism video is a good example of this and shows how a brand can still stay authentic to its voice, engage its audience, and partake in a social conversation.
You can also post on social media about any commitments you’ve made to external organizations or within your own company when it comes to things like becoming more sustainable, hiring more diverse employees, or donating to a cause that’s important to your company.
09. Make sure not all posts are promotional
To help you come across more authentic, mix your promotional posts with other types of content. You want to intersperse more “salesy” posts with other social media ideas such as user-generated content or light-hearted videos or photos that don’t have a promotional angle.
Additionally, you want to create posts or engage with customers on social media in a way that focuses on helping them, not necessarily selling to them. This can look like answering their comments on social media, showing how to use your product or service in a specific way, or encouraging your audience to reach out on social media with their questions.
10. Strive for relationships, not followers
Having a lot of followers might get you access to extra features on platforms like clickable links on Instagram Stories, but getting more Instagram followers shouldn’t be your only goal. Instead, double down on fostering relationships with the followers you have and creating new ones.
Social media is your venue to communicate with your customers. This is where you’ll convert followers into brand ambassadors, connect with your audience in a way that instills trust, and talk to them directly.
It’s better to have a smaller following with highly engaged followers than to have a larger number of followers that don’t interact with you. So, by focusing on growing your relationship with your audience, you’ll be able to increase your brand’s engagement on social media.
11. Highlight user-generated content
Whether it’s through influencers or just clients who were happy with their purchase and shared it online, these are the types of posts you should be highlighting to the rest of your audience.
As we saw earlier, user-generated content helps you change the pace from self promotional content, but aside from that, it also makes your brand look more trustworthy and authentic. When other clients see positive experiences from your customers on social media, they’ll be more likely to trust your brand. Since this is also very engaging for your followers and helps you make connections with clients who have posted about your brand online, they’ll also become more loyal.
12. Take advantage of new features
Social media platforms are always evolving in order to stay fresh and exciting. A best practice is to embrace new features on each platform and stay ahead of the curb. Sometimes, the new features may be tricky to get comfortable with, but you can make your brand stand out online if you find creative ways to use them.
Instagram is a great example of a channel that constantly releases new features. To most, this platform is viewed as a photo-sharing app, but recently, the app has added many new tools, like Reels and Shopping, that make it more of a video-sharing app. When it comes to new features, social channels algorithms often favor accounts using them over older ones, so it’s in your best interest to get on board with the trends as early as possible.
Dogs of Charm City, a community for pet owners, has embraced many of Instagram’s newer features on its profile. By using a mix of post types like images, carousels, Reels, IGTV videos, and even shoppable items, the company is staying relevant to both the platform and its audience. More than that, it also breaks up the monotony of posting the same type of content all the time.
13. Post consistently
Finally, for any of these social media marketing tips to work and help you improve your social media presence, you need to be posting consistently on any platform your brand is active on. Find a posting frequency that you and your audience are both happy with and make sure you release new content according to that schedule.
That might mean posting every day around the same time or even having specialized posts for different days of the week, such as posting user-generated content on Fridays or new product launches on Mondays.
Reaching your goals for increasing your social media presence won’t happen overnight, but if you’re consistent with your posting and remain active on all your channels, you’ll find that you’ll steadily inch closer to your objectives.