Social media is an essential tool and one of the most effective methods to reach your audience. In today's age, it is a crucial tool to meet your audience personally, which in turn grows a community of support from an audience interested in your brand.
As diverse as social media is, it is also an essential tool in reaching a niche specific to your brand. That being said, those who follow you are interested in what your brand offers. How do we get to the point of acquiring a niche following of people who are interested in the specific services or products we have to offer and activate them to become customers?
Creating content for your business might be the hardest part. In reality, people are looking for authentic communication about what you and your team do to help them decide if you're the right fit.
We're strong believers that you need a mix of inbound and outbound marketing, as we mentioned last week, and your inbound is what someone will find once they are looking for you or have heard of you.
If your social floats massive exploits and doesn't focus on what you can do for the customer, you might be missing the point. If it only focuses on the small picture, you might also miss a few clients.
We believe the sweet spot is finding a natural yet professional tone that you can take with your business to help people understand what you do, lighten the burdens they might feel around working with you, and make it fun. Be sure to avoid cold and corporate writing styles and communication on social, regardless of the size of your company. People want to know they're connecting with an actual human that cares about them, their needs, and their life.
You also want to show your expertise, but remember that people often don't really want to hear more about your business. It's important to talk about what you do in light of how it will change the consumer's life and how you can lighten their burden and get them to their goals.
Below we'll discuss a few of the primary social platforms we work with and encourage you to consider what steps your business can take to grow through content creation. As always, reach out to us if you ever have any questions or would like to have us help - jon@animusdigital.co.
While an older platform with a reputation for being stuffy or boring, LinkedIn has a highly active community looking to connect, find opportunities, and grow their businesses and networks.
Simple content strategies on LinkedIn can go a long way. Updates about your business, and personal life, showing consistent updates like wins and losses (and how you grew from them) can allow you to show a transparent look into your business, cutting through the noise of the "ads" and giving you opportunities to work with people that care about your "why" as well as your "what."
Using Instagram as the leading platform is for those who like to keep it simple and easy. This platform has a broad range of users, primarily ages 15 - 55. Organizations who rely on Instagram as their primary platform commonly search for ways to "hack the algorithm" or "how to gain 10k followers".
It's great to have growth, but getting exposure is not always about hacking the algorithm or buying followers. - In fact, you'll damage your brand in most scenarios if you go this route.
Instagram strongly values community. One of the most robust ways to gain traction on Instagram is by genuinely understanding how their current algorithm works and incorporating that into your system. Ways to engage with the community could be consistently liking and commenting on photos from other accounts that fit within your niche and responding to comments on your posts regularly.
Facebook can be a powerhouse for your brand, albeit it can feel a bit aged.
Facebook's business focus allows you to have a secondary website to guide your customers directly on the platform. There are so many ways to get your organization seen. Whether through Facebook groups, hosting a Facebook page, or running Facebook ads, this is a platform everyone should use.
This platform is especially beneficial because of the cross-platform use between Facebook and Instagram. Using Facebook ad manager allows you to manage ad campaigns between the two platforms and utilize insight tracking tools.
Tiktok
TikTok has become renowned for its benefits for small businesses. Unlike Instagram, Tiktok takes a more unfiltered approach to its algorithm, making it easier for anyone and everyone to be seen. This is a fun platform that requires consistent posting and a creative eye. While famous for dances and silly videos, it can be a really great place to disseminate your tutorials and other helpful discoveries you'd like to deliver to a somewhat younger audience.
As mentioned, community is highly valued on Instagram and limits what they believe others want to see based on who interacts with their posts. That being said, the best way to grow is by interacting with those you follow as well as those who follow you.
Everyone looking to grow on social media should regularly get involved on each platform by liking posts and responding to every comment possible. Doing so shows that you are involved in the Instagram community that is connected with your niche and therefore will help you gain organic growth on this platform. If there ever was a "hack" to growing fast, showing your interest in a platform and interacting with others by creating content and engaging with others is an easy way to do that.
Trial & Error
Let's be real. There is no perfect method for how many hashtags should be on a post or which works best. The best thing to do is experiment with the number of tags you use while testing out tags that fall within your niche. Most users on Instagram average 1-3 tags per post, but most agree that up to 11 hashtags are the most efficient at a consistent rate. There is no perfect way to hashtag your posts, but as long as you post regularly and test out different hashtags as you go along, you will find a flow of what works best for your business.
The goal of a hashtag is to garner attention from people that may share the same interests with you or your business. If you were looking for a great place to eat in Miami, you might research hashtags or locations you've seen others post to see what others are eating. In the same way, someone looking for a roofer will consider using #miamiroofer as a search alongside Google.
Tags Specific to Your Brand
There's no perfect way to hashtags, but here are methods we recommend to find tags that fit your brand.
Check out your competition and see what tags they are using. They may have been posting longer than you and may have already found many titles that fit within the vibe of your brand. Scroll through their posts and gather inspiration on what tags they use and how you can use/create tags that fit your page.
In the same way, check out your audience and see what tags they are using. It's a good idea to scroll through your following and find an account that fits the exact person you are targeting your brand towards. See what hashtags they use and discover how you can find more people like them who are more likely to be interested in your brand.
After you do these and test out different tags, scroll through your account insights, whether on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok and find what hashtags brought in the most traffic for your page. After accomplishing this, compile a list of hashtags to pull from for each post and keep growing your list and testing new tags as you go along. As a side note, be sure not to use the same sequence of tags on every post. Most algorithms recognize this, and your post is less likely to perform.
We've created a list for some further reading. Check out some of these blogs below:
