Your Social Media Strategist Reveals his Strategies
Develop a strategy before you begin building a social media following. It will take time and effort on your part but your chances of success will be greatly improved. If you just fly by the seat of your pants, you will inevitably suffer aggravating setbacks that otherwise could have been avoided. Put in the effort, do a bit of research and hire a social media management company that knows how to do it right.
GIVE IT TIME
The most important thing to be aware of, from the very beginning, is that building a strong social media following takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight, there will be ups and downs. If you decide to go it alone, expect some long stretches where it seems you are not making any progress at all. Just hang on through these slow periods that leave you doubting yourself. As long as you put the effort into developing a strategy, you will see results … eventually. This step can be made much easier, of course, by utilizing the knowledge and experience of a social media management team.
PICK A SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNEL
Think about your target audience. Where are they most likely to spend their time socializing online? Pick your social media channels based on this and your content. Will your content consist primarily of videos or pictures and text? Some examples of different social media channels are:
Facebook
Google+
Pinterest
Twitter
YouTube
Pictures and text work well on Facebook while YouTube works well for videos. Don’t spread yourself too thin. remember, you will have to manage these pages – unless you choose to go with an experienced company to manage these pages. It is better to be able to really focus on a few channels if you are doing it yourself. If you are trying to manage too many channels, it will get overwhelming. You will find yourself struggling to keep up and your social media following may begin to drop off. This is where a social media management team comes in: we offer full services which give you a completely “hands-off” experience.
DO YOUR RESEARCH
If you decide that you can handle this undertaking on your own, remember, study your competitors. Take a look at what the most successful competitors are doing as opposed to the less successful ones. This will help you understand what will or won’t work for you. If they are successful, they are doing something right. If you choose to go with a professional company, this will all be done for you. A social media strategist may offer some insight on a consultation basis to help you along your way.
STAND OUT FROM THE REST
Consider doing something similar to what the competition is doing but find a way to stand out. You want to get your audience’s attention and keep it. How you do that will depend primarily on your target audience and what you are promoting. Decide what will work best for you and stay consistent. If there needs to be some variation, find something that you can use consistently across the board. For example:
*Use the same lettering throughout.
*Stick with a particular type of imagery – simple and clean or busy, bright colours or muted.
*Add your stamp to all of your images. This could be over to one side, in a corner or across the whole image.
At Yopie, we test to find what works best for you and we stay consistent.
CREATE A SCHEDULE
Determine how often you should share/post on each social media site. Schedule the shares/posts and stay consistent. The sharing/posting frequency will vary, depending on the site. For example, you will want to share/post more often on Twitter than Facebook. This is another aspect of social media building that you can get some help with from an experienced social media management service. Allow them to find what works best. By working with a social media service company like Yopie or any social media strategist, you will get the results you need while maintaining the ability to focus on more important things.
