Achieving Social Media Success: Five Tips

Social media can be one of the most effective marketing tools at your disposal. When used correctly, it does a great job of each phase of your sales funnel. With engaging content and the right hashtags, it’s a phenomenal awareness tool and can get your brand in front of hundreds of leads. Educational and informative content can help guide leads through the consideration phase, and when they decide it’s time to buy, social media can be a phenomenal sales tool, highlighting past projects, testimonials, and case studies that close the sale.

Despite social media’s massive potential for growing your business, thousands of companies are misusing the platforms and struggling to get off the ground. To help you improve your social media game, we’ve provided Ridgeway Communications’ Top Five Tips for social media success:

1: Use the Platform Your Target Audience Uses

Depending on your industry, your audience may hang out in different places, and using the right platforms is essential for social media success.

For example, B2B/professional services companies will likely find the most success on Linkedin, because that’s the platform that most business professionals use. B2C/retail companies, on the other hand, may be better off on Instagram and Facebook, because those are the spaces they spend the most time.

It’s not necessarily important to not use platforms that aren’t optimized for you. Doing so won’t hurt. The most important thing is making sure that you ARE in the places you are optimized for.

2: Provide Value, Don’t Sell

Would you watch a TV channel with no shows, and only played commercials? Of course not! The same principle applies to social media.

Social media is “Earned Media,” which means people follow your content by choice, rather than you paying for them to see it. That means that you can’t spend all your time selling yourself to them, because they’ll only engage with content that provides value and they want to see more of.

Obviously, what your target audience values depends on a number of factors, but the key is to experiment with posts that aim to provide value and find what resonates with your audience. We recommend starting with infographics, tips & tricks, industry news, and how-to guides.

3: Maintain a Consistent Posting Schedule

When companies have banked content, it’s common to post it all in a few days. Once they run out, they’ll usually stop posting for weeks until they build more. This is a common mistake that hurts your performance with the algorithm and post-engagement. Rather than this feast-and-famine approach, it’s more effective to post consistently over time.

For example, if you have four posts prepared, you’ll find more success posting once a week for a full month, than four days one week then nothing for three. Consistency gives your audience something to look forward to, and shows you’re a reliable source for content. Plus, stretching your content out over a month gives you much longer to build content for the next month.

4: Automate Your Posts

Consistency is important for successful social media, but it’s understandably hard for business owners to find time to post during their busy weeks. Luckily, most social media platforms offer free post-scheduling tools for scheduling content in advance. They also provide analytics tools for showing what posts are building traction, and which aren’t resonating with your audience.

The free softwares are ideal for most businesses, but if you’re looking for a better user experience or more detailed analytics, paid softwares are also available. Ridgeway Communications has experience with Hootsuite and Later. In general, we’ve found that Hootsuite is easier to use and has better analytics tools, especially for LinkedIn and Facebook. Later, on the other hand, offers better plans for those posting to fewer accounts, and is much more cost-effective (at roughly 1/3 the cost).

5: Interact With Your Audience

Your audience wants to feel like they’re part of a larger conversation. One of the easiest ways to do that is by engaging with your audience.

Audience engagement can take many forms. It can mean asking questions in your posts, responding to comments and DM's, posting to your story, or answering questions in future posts that you’ve received from your audience.

There isn’t any one correct way to engage with your audience, however, it’s important to make sure that you do in some way, and make them feel noticed and valued by your company.