Social Media has become a daily routine use for a majority of people. Staying connected, reading articles, or trying to find new media to consume, people are constantly using social media for a wide variety of purposes. This makes it an easy tool to boost your business's brand awareness and find your target audience in order to promote your business. 

Adults in the United States spend an average of 12 hours and 9 minutes daily on social media. As a marketing strategist, it is important to think about how you can use that screen time to get people interested in your company or to have more people recognize your business and its purpose. This guide will help you understand how and why properly managing your social media accounts can help your business grow and thrive. 

Why Should My Business Have a Social Media Account?

On the surface, social media seems like it is used for people to communicate with friends and family or just for personal usage in general. The reality is that thousands of businesses create social media accounts to help reach their audience and market their company. Companies can spend up to $1,000 to $20,000 per month on professional social media services.

While as a business owner, you may think it is a waste of time and resources to promote yourself on social media, the reality is that marketing your business on social media can help bring in a giant influx of revenue if used correctly. 

There are hundreds of different factors that can help a business reach its audience on social media. One of them being search engine optimization or SEO being used as a tool to reach audiences within your business’ niche. Optimizing and researching SEO keywords and strategies can determine how you appear on consumers' search engine result pages.

A majority of consumers are more likely to spread word of mouth via social media to promote websites, products, or services in which they find a lot of value in. It is important to have an online presence in this instance so that people can easily promote your business’s website or social media accounts to their friends or followers. 

Your business should have a social media account to quickly, efficiently, and conveniently advertise your business or services to thousands upon thousands of individuals that spend their time on social media platforms. This is in addition to posting about your company life and mission statements so audiences can better understand what values and ideas your business upholds.

How Can I Elevate My Business’s Social Media Platforms?

There are hundreds of different platforms to use to promote your business, the main ones being Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Depending on your business and its target audience, you should create an account on specific platforms, but an account on every platform is not required in order to be successful. 

Each platform is used in different ways, for example, Twitter is good for quick static organic posts that can showcase something you want to promote in a quick and witty way. A lot of major companies have tried to mimic and encompass the success of the Wendy’s Twitter Account by creating a more comedic approach to their replies and posts on Twitter, but this method may not work with how your company has branded itself. 

It is good to know the purpose of how you brand yourself on social media by understanding your target audience. You can elevate your company’s social media accounts by understanding what your audience finds entertaining. 

Good examples of this can be found via Duolingo’s TikTok account, where their audience is a majority of younger Gen Z and Millennials, they create content that is relevant to current trends and provides humor in order to promote their product. Social media platforms like TikTok have the capability to make your content go viral, the challenge with this is it takes a lot of planning, research, and dedication to attempt to make content for your account that can go viral. 

It is best to test out a variety of content you and your marketing team thinks best showcases your business’ values and ideals while reaching your specific audience. This can be a very difficult task to do without any experience in marketing or social media in general, that is why digital marketing agencies like LSM exist. Our team of experts can help your business grow its social media platform by researching, developing, and testing different marketing strategies to boost visibility and engagement on all your social media platforms. 

What Kind of Content Should My Business Post on Social Platforms?

Depending on your business, it is key to focus heavily on promoting your products and services with either static content or video content that effectively showcases what your business is trying to sell to consumers. 

It is also important to remember that you should showcase your company’s culture and values to your audience so they can feel a more personal connection to your business. Having posts about new office buildings, employee highlights, or how your business is involved in local community events allows your audience to understand more about who you are as a brand but more importantly who you are as people. 

Posting news and updates is a good way to help loyal or even new customers see what your company has to offer. But be sure to post a diverse set of content so that way people can enjoy more than just one type of content on your social media platforms.

If you are a small business and you are trying to market yourself, it can seem challenging since you may not have a large team to showcase, but creating any kind of engaging content can help build an audience and set of customers for your business. 

Quality over quantity is important to remember when developing strategies for what to post on online platforms. Take the time to plan out content that can work across a variety of platforms. From your Instagram account to your Pinterest, people will gravitate towards content that is engaging and high quality. 

How Can I Boost Promotion of My Products or Services on Social Media?

There are a couple of ways you can get your product or service promoted across more than just your business’ social media accounts. With digital marketing and advertising, you can promote your business via social media advertisements to reach a larger range of customers. 

One benefit of Social media advertising is that it is the most affordable form of advertising available today. You can reach thousands of new customers within your target demographic for a fraction of the cost of advertising via traditional print. Plus, you’ll have access to real-time data showcasing your audience and how well your advertisements perform and are being engaged with.

Another way to promote your business is with influencer marketing. This means reaching out to big influencers within your target market and asking them to promote your product or service. The benefit of influencer marketing is that they already have a loyal and established audience that trusts their opinion on a product or service. By using influencers, it not only increases potential leads and customers, but it establishes more brand identity as well. 

Choosing the right influencer to talk about your business is key, since their personality, ideas, and values should be similar or align as closely to your business as possible. Once you have found the perfect influencer who can reach an audience that is the best target demographic, start by establishing a relationship with them by following them, liking their posts, and even leaving comments. That way when you finally reach out to them, they can see that you are aware and embrace the content that they post. It should be a healthy balance between business and influencer to consistently promote one another to establish to audiences of their connection to one another.

If you’re a newly established business it is most likely best to start with social media advertising until you have built your brand up enough to dive into influencer marketing. Gaining traction online takes a lot of patience and proper strategizing, so it may take time to see the results you want. The best part of social media marketing is once you have established your audience and start to grow, your following can stay pretty consistent and have a lot more opportunities for growth. 

How to Stay Ahead of Evolving Social Media Platforms?

From TikTok to BeReal, there is always a new platform that can pop up and shake up the way people spend their time on social media. As a business, it can be frustrating to see this happen when you feel like you just got the hang of other platforms like Instagram or Facebook. 

If staying on top of evolving social trends sounds stressful, then hiring a digital marketing agency like LSM,  can help manage your social media to help alleviate the worry and stress of staying on top of evolving trends, new features to already established platforms, or any new form of social media that pops up that could be right for your business to be on. 

Having your team be ahead and on top of any new social media trends shows your audience that you put in the time and effort to stay on top of their needs and how they retain news and information. A good example of this is when Instagram first added stories, a lot more people shifted to watching Instagram stories to get news and updates on businesses or people they follow. So, businesses had to get ahead by working on content strategies of when and what they should be posting on their stories to get consumers’ attention. 

It is hard to predict social media trends or software changes, but having a team of experts that stay up to date with every platform and potential new platforms is very beneficial for your digital marketing strategies. For example, we have a prediction that Instagram is going to evolve into a more popularize eCommerce shopping platform and that things like Virtual Reality and AI technology will influence the way people online shop. These predictions can help your business strategize future content ideas and help get an edge on the changes that could affect how you market yourselves on different social media platforms. 

Social media has the power to influence thousands of people at the simple touch of a button. It has quickly become one of the most efficient and rising forms of marketing as the digital world continues to evolve and develop as an everyday part of people's lives. Keeping your business and branding engaged on these digital platforms can help you reach new or already loyal customers and build relationships with your audience on each platform. 

Managing, creating, and posting content on social media platforms may seem like a lot of unnecessary work, but the results are truly worth putting the time and effort into establishing a strong social media presence. Create more brand awareness and generate more leads with targeted demographics that create an influx of business that will spread throughout online communities interested in your products or services.

Hiring a digital marketing agency like LSM can help relieve your stress if your team doesn't have the skills to handle your digital marketing strategies. From social media management to email marketing, LSM is equipped to handle a variety of digital marketing strategies and campaigns to help fully optimize your branding and brand awareness. If you're interested in utilizing our expertise in digital marketing strategies for your business, book a free consultation with LSM today!

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