There’s this thing on the internet that people continue to refer to as “social media.” Maybe you’ve heard of it, too.
While it’s notoriously tied to millennials and young professionals through virtual community-building since the early 2000s, the term “social media” is merely slang for the current state of the internet. And it’s much more than any of these descriptions could ever begin to portray.
As a business owner who focuses on digital transformation and new media integrations every day, I believe it’s important to come to terms with the fact that getting your business involved with social media isn’t something that’s a nice-to-have. It is critical to recognize the significance these tools play as a force in humanity — how people communicate with each other and where they spend large amounts of their time.
Mobile
Once you understand the significance that mobile plays in our daily lives, it should snap you into an awareness that this is not only changing our behavior as a society, but it’s happening very quickly. For example, did you know that the average person spends more than three hours on their mobile devices every single day? More than half of that time is spent on social media.
So, whether you’re an executive for a large Fortune 500 company or an owner of a small or medium-sized business, you can no longer take a backseat to the industry of digital transformation that is playing out in front of us. Take a moment to consider this: As pointed out in this article, only 60 companies that were listed in the Fortune 500 in 1955 remained on the list in 2017. That means it took only 60 years to completely disrupt 88% of the world’s top companies. This statistic doesn’t even begin to consider the rapid growth of newer disruptive technologies like mobile, social, the cloud, AI and big data.
You don’t need to be a futurist to know that these communication methods have significantly altered what we value and pay attention to as a culture. But there are still many legacy thinkers who don’t believe these cultural shifts cross over into business today. When it comes to advertising and marketing tactics, these people still think that traditional means have more value.
There’s no denying that people’s attention is shifting away from the traditional radio and television sets, and more into their favorite social media channels and networks every day. Taking this into consideration, now is a perfect time to shift some of those marketing dollars into these social platforms to ensure that you’re engaging with your customers in the platforms that are already natural to them, versus relying on the traditional channels that have worked for the last several decades. While advertising on social is still relatively new, the price for people’s attention is still incredibly low in comparison to what it’s taken previously to have your messages heard by the masses.
Below are a couple of high-level tactics that you can employ to begin leveraging these tools to help grow your businesses and brands. I’ll be sure to write a follow-up article that drills down into each in greater detail at a later time.
Determine your goals.
The first step to any social campaign is to identify what your goals are. Are you using social to create awareness and transparency for your internal company culture? Is it about raising your brand’s awareness? Is it going to be used to showcase your customers? Will it be used for a lead generation strategy? Whatever the case is, make sure that you’re clear around the goals, and develop content and messaging to support them.
Understand your metrics.
Over the last few years, social media companies have begun providing data and insights to their business pages with the hopes of allowing businesses to better understand how well content is being received by their audiences.
There are entire strategies on how to maximize these results, such as the times at which content is being posted, as well as connecting with specific demographics and regions that are in alignment with your brand strategy. At the end of the day, these metrics will help you better understand what is working, and ultimately define value to your management, while allowing you to evolve your content over time.
Utilize your brand/style guidelines.
If your company has a brand identity (using specific colors, fonts, etc.), make sure that your social media posts reflect this. While social is still very much an evolving ecosystem, it is important to remember that it is also a powerful extension of your company or brand.
If you work for a large organization, or your company is taking on social media for a client, decision makers will want to stay informed with what is being posted. Be prepared to have an organized document with what you’re planning to post with the basics: how, when, the value and why.
Test, repeat and optimize.
Now that the guidelines have been outlined, it’s time to begin putting this into action, and there’s no better way to do this than by coming up with a social calendar or posting schedule.
If you’re not familiar with these, there are several free services out there that can help you publish your content while also understanding how well it’s performing. Targeting your audience can drastically impact your Instagram scheduling, particularly if you’re targeting an audience in several time zones.
After you’ve done your initial testing with a few posts and have analyzed the data, you should begin to optimize your post schedule depending on the results.
Takeaway
We’re at a unique time in human history, with the ability to reach people in ways only dreamed about in the past. Because of this, it’s extremely important to not only stay the course of leveraging these new tools and techniques even if you’re not seeing the immediate results that you’re striving for, but actually double down on it. Because if you don’t, you’re bound to get left behind.
Things aren’t just changing at a rapid rate. Things have changed.
