From building a niche and identifying your audience to being experimental and mindful of your content, these social media tips and tricks are all you need to grow your social media brand in 2022.
Social media is one of the most powerful entities in the digital world that can have a strong hold on how well your business performs. If your brand is not present on social media, it might as well not exist. Be it a customer, a supplier, or a potential employee, social media is the first point of contact they make with your brand. Social media has evolved considerably over the years and so have the ways to excel in it. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you stay on top of your social media game in 2022.
- Choose a niche, and build on it. Whenever an individual accesses their social media profile, they are presented with a variety of content based on the people they are following, the content they keep going back to, and the profiles they visit. All this content is based on the user’s interest and can be of different niches. A niche is a particular area/section/service in a larger entity. It is a sub-category to a category. For instance, books, architecture, travel, fashion, and lifestyle are some niches that have garnered a lot of interest on social media. Whether you are introducing a business, service or your influencer profile, niching down is very important. If the purpose for your social media profile is to drive traffic to your beauty product, you cannot talk about the wonders of the world on your page. You don’t have to promote your product in every post, but you will have to make beauty your niche. To put it simply, identifying and sticking to a niche is very important when it comes to social media. Be very mindful of how you build up your presence within your niche as they bring you one step closer to your target customers.
- Identify your audience and their problem points. Niches, however important, do increase the competition one faces in making a place for their brand. Once you have identified your niche, it is imperative that you try to understand the audience under that particular niche. You need to understand their pain points and their curiosities before you go on promoting your product. You have to understand why a particular audience is attracted to a niche. Is it to gain more knowledge? Is it for entertainment? Is it to help them learn something new? You can work on identifying your audience by analyzing the content and services of your competitors and taking a survey about what your audiences like and what they’d want. You should continuously revise and access your content and audience in order to make the best out of the reach you have. You can also use google analytics to help you understand what works for you and what doesn’t. Additionally, you cannot keep posting about how amazing your product/ service is, you need to strike a balance. You have to give your audience a peek into what your style is before you ask them to commit to your service.
- Keep up with different social media algorithms. Different social media platforms operate on different algorithms. You have to work according to these algorithms to gain the traction you intend to from these platforms. Instagram, for example, ranks posts based on the information you have detailed (location, caption, hashtags), the business’ history with the users interacting with the post (likes, comments, shares), and on that your activity across the platform. You cannot limit yourself to simply posting the right way, you have to interact with your audience and you have to be good at it. On the other hand, Facebook presents content on the basis of what it feels will be relevant to the user. There is no chronological order and hence you are important only if your content is relevant. Many businesses make videos their cornerstone to being relevant as it garners better reach as compared to photos. Similarly, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. all operate on their particular algorithms which should be kept in mind before you post on these platforms.
- Plan varied content for your different social media profiles. In the previous point, we discussed how the algorithms for different social media pages are different and how businesses are tackling these challenges. One of the best strategies to get along with the algorithm is to plan varied content for different platforms. You cannot post the same thing across all your social platforms. While Facebook is all about videos and curated content, Instagram is about high-resolution images, quotes, and stories. LinkedIn is about job posts and company updates and twitter is focused on news, blogs, and GIFs. On the other hand, Pinterest is conquered best with photo guides. Work on platforms that are most suitable for your business and be meaningful with your content.
- Make the best use of automation tools and be open to paid advertising. Social media is a complicated realm that is time-consuming for social media managers to handle. To help these managers tackle their work better, there are different automation tools available for free and on subscription. Tools like Later, Buffer, Hootsuite, Snapseed, Pexels, etc. are gifts from the digital Gods for social media management. These tools help you schedule multiple posts for multiple social media platforms, track and analyze your reach, edit photos and videos, and to keep an archive of your social profiles. With access to such tools, you’ll easily be able to handle the multiple platforms you work for. Additionally, you should not shy away from paid promotion. While you do your best to reach your target audience, promoting your content can give you exposure in areas you are missing out on. If your promoted content is alluring and strong enough, relevant users are sure to visit your profile.
- Be inspired, be authentic. Social media may be a part of the digital world, but it also derives from real life. Given the fact that authenticity is the best-admired quality in the real world, the same goes for social media. If you are trying to be superficial in your message, the audience does not connect with you. You have to show the real challenges and emotions that are the mettle of your product. You must have seen social media influencers getting real on their platform about the challenges they face and their troubles in life mixed with all the fun they have. This helps the audience connect with them. Similarly, brands share their team events, photoshoots behind the scenes, and audience experiences to help bring about some relativity and mundane touch to their profiles. To bring about this authentic side, you can use a strategy unique to you or you can look into the profiles of your competitors and draw inspiration for what you want to put out there. Keep in mind that you simply have to take inspiration from what you see, and come up with an idea that is all you.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle works for social media as well. Yet another real-world concept that works in the digital era is that of the three R: reduce, reuse and recycle. As a social media manager, it is imperative that you go about your social media profiles from time to time and archive the posts that do not make much sense on your profile for the time being. Such posts can include content including irrelevant information or posts that disturb your grid. However, never delete any post until and unless it’s misinformation. Reusing your posts can be extremely therapeutical for you as a social media manager. It’s one less social media post you have to research, design, put captions and hashtags on, and all the other hundred steps you have to follow to make a post successful. Additionally, it brings about a sense of nostalgia, allowing the audience to re-engage with a piece of content they already loved in the first place. Influencers, you must have seen, post their older reels and photos on their stories to increase the footprint on their profiles.
- Be open to experimenting. When it comes to social media, there is no right or wrong content that you can go about posting. It is a journey, that is unique for everyone. You have to be open to trying out different types of content and different ways of presenting your content before you have a few templates that work for you. You have to take the risk to be able to get the reward. It is also important to upgrade your templates from time to time so that your social media profile doesn’t get too monotonous.
Social media, in a nutshell, is not the easiest platform to work on while simultaneously being pretty easy. It gets as complicated as the last line was and it can be as easy as the eight points stated above. It is a social media manager’s job to plan, schedule, and analyzes what is best for their brand.