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Social media. Love it or loathe it, it has become an integral part of building an online presence over the past decade. Content creators the world over rely on various platforms for brand awareness and directing traffic to their sites. Developing and maintaining an online presence is now more important than ever, and the competition is growing stronger all the time.
The key to success is adapting and maintaining digital relevance. But with new platforms coming out and ever-changing algorithms, the world of social media management can be tricky to understand. Check out our tips and tricks for social media, the tools you can use and how you can make it work for your business.
When the term content creator is brought up, images of social media influencers and travel bloggers come to mind. But the term is so much broader than that. A content creator can be defined as an individual or business that creates material across any media online. Before setting out on your journey, define what your content is and what you wish to gain from your journey.
Like most things in life, it is critical to have clear objectives and a plan to ensure success and maximize your exposure.
Some tips include:
The use of hashtags is proven to increase engagement and impressions, so it is important to stay up-to-date. Hashtags allow the grouping of your content into a specific category and also allows organic discovery of your brand.
Finding key dates in the calendar will help with your hashtag selection. Whether it's a nationwide holiday, a day related to your content or a simple social traffic driving date, these will help you stay relevant. Planning a content calendar ahead of time will streamline your workflow ultimately saving you time.
The common misconception with social media is that running the same post across all platforms saves time and gives you a similar outcome in analytics. However, one of our ultimate social media tips and tricks is to adapt your style and voice across different platforms.
A good place to start is to construct an audit of your community to see what brand voice would retain maximum engagement across your platforms. Study how your audience speaks, who they follow and what they interact with. This can provide invaluable information to aid your strategy.
Next up, remember that each platform has a different audience in itself:
Ultimately, you do not have to spread yourself too thinly across multiple platforms. Focus your energy on a few, to begin with. You may find that your audience is more receptive to imagery, therefore video-based media is not the optimum tool for you. It's all about experimentation.
How you post can be as important as what you post. Creating a diverse library of content formats can be key to maintaining an engaged audience. Statistics show that mixing up your content can increase engagement and impressions, from a simple image post to the more complex infographic and video content.
Image galleries such as Shutterstock and Getty images are great for sourcing stock images for Facebook and Twitter posts. Whereas, tools like Canva are great for producing social media graphics personalized to the style of your content.
So, you have your platforms all set up now you need a central hub from which to manage them. There are many options out there but what are the advantages to upgrading your management system? The obvious time-saver is giving you full control and a visual layout of what is going on without the need to log in and out. As well as easily scheduling posts, giving you an overview of incoming messages and some systems, like Sprout, offer in-depth analytics and summary tools. These range from basic reports on audience behavior and follower numbers to more in-depth summaries on SEO (search engine optimization) keywords and industry trends. Sprout can be personalized to your reporting needs.
Much like word-of-mouth, cross-promotion and collaboration with other content creators can be priceless for your brand. Promoting content from others and tagging the source will widen your organic audience. Once your following gains traction, you may even discover that others wish to work with you and cross-promote.
Our last social media tip is once you have the basics of organic traffic and engagement under wraps, it may be time to look into paid advertising and sponsored posts. Now, this isn't the best route for all content creators, but in order to grow your business, it is a viable option.
Sidestepping the ever-changing organic algorithms, paid advertising takes many forms. One effective route is collaborating with similar content outlets to produce sponsored posts that can be shared on their social platforms. Offering the opportunity to present your content to a new set of eyes, increasing brand awareness.
In addition, there is always the paid social media advertising route, with Facebook being the preference for 97% of marketers. Whichever platform you decide to advertise on initially, you need to define your audience in order to target effectively. Worried about the purse strings? Paid ads can cost as much or as little as your budget will allow.
There is no magic wand to wave to create viral posts. Ultimately, the world of social media is an ever-changing one and having background knowledge will aid you to present your content to those that will engage with it the most. Crucially, it's about you. You are the one talking to the audience, laying the foundations to create a strong visual brand and fluent tone of voice for your business content.
Whether you're working solo or as part of a team, use Trint to turn your stories into content for social media.
