Building Your Social Media Presence.
Why is social media important?
The world is moving at a very fast pace technologically and with it, the use of social media too has rapidly increased — making it essential for brands to stay connected and engage with their audience.
Even for musicians or artists, it has come to a point in time where it’s integral to stay in touch with their followers and keep sharing content. Since most teens already use social media for day to day purposes, they already have a presence, but it’s important to know how to make the most of it — to be aware of the tools that can be used and things you need to keep a lookout for.
In addition to staying abreast of changing trends, being on social media provides you with the ability to reach your target audience across the world, with no geographical boundaries stopping you from doing so and allows you to show the world who you are.
Your Profile
Instagram, Twitter & Facebook are some of the leading social media platforms out there. It’s important to pick the correct platform for your purpose, whether it’s offering a good or service or sharing your passions and hobbies. For example, if you are running a retail space and you want to promote your products, ideally having more focus on Instagram and Facebook as opposed to Twitter would give you the better results. These applications are better optimized for targeting the right audience, converting inquiries into sales and being able to share content with barely any limitations. The two platforms can be easily integrated together, making it very easy to disseminate uniform content across multiple platforms with just one click. This also allows customers to find you online with much ease.
Jeff Bezos (Founder of Amazon) once said;
“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room”
William Arruda (Personal Branding guru) quotes;
“Your brand is a unique promise of value”
Mark Zuckerberg (CEO and co-founder of Facebook) says ;
“You have one identity…. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Quality of content
Relevant, Authentic, Engaging and Positive Content
We live in a day and age of information overload where a lot of unnecessary information is constantly being thrown at us. As such, it is imperative that those who are looking to build their social media presence find a way to stay ahead of the game and stand out. They need to stay relevant and consistently engage with their audience as the competition for people’s attention keeps rapidly increasing.
Quality over quantity plays a huge role, now more than ever. It helps a business craft an image of who they are in the consumer’s mind so it’s important to “Think twice, Post once”, i.e. only post content that makes people want to come back to your page for more.
Ensuring your content is unique and engaging to your target audience, keeping things positive and avoiding content that may spark controversy are a vital points to keep in mind when using social media. For example, refrain from getting into debates about political affairs' or religious beliefs as these topics are very sensitive and could strike a nerve resulting in the loss of a follower.
If you fail to keep your social media pages relevant and authentic and have content that's not engaging, you would soon start to lose credibility among followers as people won’t have the trust in your brand or take it seriously.
Content Planning
Plan and manage the content you post
Firstly, objectives must be set prior to posting content to make sure you have a direction. Thereafter, a plan has to be formulated to achieve the set objectives and it is on then that the content you want to share has to be decided on so that the content doesn’t seem impulsive and lacking direction.
Once these initial steps have been thought out, it is important to do some research on social media usage so that the best times to post can be decided on to maximize reach and engagement. In addition to all of these factors, it is a quality over quantity focus that would really make you stand out in the crowd.
If you fail to plan your content effectively, you will not be maximizing the reach the post could gain. For example, if you post at off-peak times such as in the middle of the night when not many people are online, the post will not effectively reach the target audience.
With detailed insights available on social media platforms in the present day, you can get a very clear picture on the best times to post which types of content to a particular audience.
Sites like Sprout Social or Hubspot come in handy as they will also help you plan & organize your content.
Marketing
Defining your target audience
A fundamental of marketing is to identify your target audience and to keep building awareness about your product or service. For example, demographic information such as age, purchasing power, social class, location and gender will be the stepping stones for identifying your audience. Once you have a clear idea on who your audience is and target said audience accordingly, you will have more control over who you interact with and you will also be saving a lot of resources in terms of time and money spent trying to get the attention of the right audience. A simple example of this would be if you are a business that sells products for pets, you should be targeting pet owners since your largest audience will be pet owners. This will help you get noticed in your area of expertise.
You can also perform keyword searches based on the information at hand so that posts are better targeted and the page is found by people with similar interests.
The importance of joining groups and forums
You will meet like-minded individuals by joining groups and forums related to your area of expertise and you can use it as a networking tool to build long-term relationships based on mutual interests.
This also helps with getting feedback for a certain new product idea you may have and ant to test out before putting it into the market. You can conduct marketing surveys or questionnaires about a new product you are about to launch to get a feeler from a sample of your target audience to gauge if the idea would be a success and worth investing in.
Insights
Analytics tools can be used to monitor your page traffic and content performance along with the most important metrics that should be monitored to ensure you are meeting your objectives.
Monitoring and analyzing these metrics will be very important to continuously improve your social media presence going forward. Basically, taking note of what works and what doesn’t. To improve what's working and to change what's not working.
Monitoring SEO and advert insights with the help of web analytics or data can also aid in amending your strategy along the way to attract more visitors to your page and thus achieve a stronger return on investment for your product or service.
Google offers a free web analytics software that you can place on your site and monitor by yourself.
With the help of web analytics you will gain more insights about whether your strategy to build your social media presence is working or not. For example, you will be able to get an idea if people are clicking on the links you post or if they have clicked and instantly left your website which is known as “bounce rate”.
By having information like this available in the palm of your hand, you can decide which areas you need to focus your attention more. It’s like you are constantly listening to your customers.
Privacy
Privacy, something that is often overlooked by the younger generation. We are at a point in mime when it should be given the utmost importance. With the ever increasing number of spam E-mails or viruses that are out there, making sure you are aware of the privacy policy tabs that you usually click “I agree” on without batting an eyelid when creating accounts, should be taken into serious consideration.
Another important practice in order to protect your privacy online is to ensure you set strong passwords which will minimize the risk of someone from getting into your account and hacking it. You can make your password very strong by having a combination of letters (with at least one uppercase and 1 lowercase letter), symbols and numbers. Some platforms also allow you to have multi-factor authentication to make a hacker’s life much more complicated and to keep your information safe.
Knowing how to properly report content about yourself that’s wrongfully posted by others will help you keep your presence authentic and will eliminate misinformation about yourself that gets posted on a public platform (not everyone will know what’s fake and what’s not).
It’s vital to educate yourself and be aware about the risks of fraud and identity theft in the cyber space if you are building an online presence and are active online. Sharing things like your location or posting pictures of you being away from your home can leave you vulnerable in the eyes of a burglar. Always be alert when you decide to post your current location.
If you are posting content about someone else, always remember to think about the person you are posting about and get consent prior to posting it to ensure they are in agreement with what is being posted.
Most social media platforms have options to customize your privacy settings so that it suits your preferences. It is in your best interest to use all these tools available to you in order to stay safe, protect yourself and out of trouble.
References
https://de.ryerson.ca/de_courses/templates/m/?c=2B7B82A7EC6DE40781FD6EF338B41892&m=1&p=148446
https://de.ryerson.ca/de_courses/templates/m/?c=2B7B82A7EC6DE40781FD6EF338B41892&m=4&p=149330
https://de.ryerson.ca/de_courses/templates/m/?c=2B7B82A7EC6DE40781FD6EF338B41892&m=10&p=149613
