6 Ways to Inject Creativity into Your Social Media Strategy
Social media is an effective and cost-efficient way to attract positive attention to your company, product or professional services. With the right strategy, you can interact directly with customers and industry leaders globally. On the other hand, the careless use of social media can damage your business or career in a matter of days. To ensure that you avoid these common pitfalls, we’ve put together 6 ways you can incorporate social media creatively into your business’ marketing strategy.
1. Use the tools
Make use of social media’s plethora of marketing tools such as commenting, sharing and likes. This not only encourages user participation, but also collects relevant engagement data. Keep track of current trends and patterns in both your personal and industry-based social media data, in order to benchmark your progress.
2. Build a community
Build your very own online community by tapping into existing networks, with the use of strategies such as a newsletter. As well as this, each time you hold an event, collate an attendance database to further grow your outreach potential.
3. Use promotional products
Incorporating fun and relevant promotional items into your social media strategy is a great way to include several marketing techniques in your overall business plan. There are many ways you can do this. Promotional products can be used as part of the prize for social media competitions, or as a random gift for valued customers or relevant bloggers.
4. Incorporate all platforms
The most successful businesses incorporate as many social media platforms as are relevant to them. A good tip is to observe how your competitors and similar businesses use social media. For example, some companies use Twitter and Facebook to offer coupons, promote causes, and share photos and videos. Others use social media to spotlight their customers, call attention to case studies and blog posts, or start online communities.
5. Give people a reason to engage
It’s important to remember that the most popular people on social media networks aren’t always talking about themselves. They recognise and help others, including customers, businesses journalists. Encourage people to engage with you and your brand by:
- Asking your customers for advice
- Conducting surveys and contests
- Offering coupons or incentives
- Retweeting others’ posts
- Being nice to others (they might just return the favour!)
6. Measure the results
Attracting a high number of fans and followers isn’t the best way to measure success if your followers can’t help your business. On the other hand, if you connect with one influential thought-leader or an investor with deep pockets, then it may not matter whether you have 100 followers or 1000. How you measure the results of your social media efforts will depend on the goals you set at the beginning.
Social media networks can provide a powerful channel to increase your brand awareness, enhance brand appearance plus attract and retain customers. Taking full advantage of your presence on the web could easily mean the difference between being memorable and landing an opportunity, or just being another brick in the wall. Adhere to these 6 helpful tips in order to maximise your business’ reach and thus overall success.
