5 New Year’s Resolutions for Brands on Social

With the ever growing landscape of social media, it’s becoming impossible to avoid. It’s no longer an optional part of marketing; audiences expect a social presence from their favourite brands, as it allows them to feel connected, solve problems and become more than just fans. But with so much competition, it’s easy to waste your time without getting any results. So here are 5 resolutions brands should consider for effective social media marketing.

Create quality (not quantity) content

How many times a week should you be posting? How many times a day? You’ll get mixed messages, from posting multiple times a day to just a couple of times a month. If you’re correctly using a paid strategy, your content will effectively always be ‘on’ and working for you, regardless of how often you post. The focus should be on creating quality content. It’s better to share three high quality posts with original images and engaging copy per week than throwing out multiple posts each day with the same messages, that don’t provide any value to the consumer. So before you create something to share a post, ask yourself how this post will be genuinely useful to your audience.

Shake up your audience targeting

Social media has the almost unlimited potential to reach whoever you want to talk to. It doesn’t just have to be the people who already like or follow your page. Your prospective audience is out there waiting to hear from you. But how do you know you’re talking to the right people? Using a paid media strategy to reach not only different demographics but also sub-sectors of those demographics will help you define who is really engaging with your brand. Every ad (whether it’s for £1 or £1,000) is a chance to learn more about your audiences. And to get the best ROI, you need to shake up your audiences. Switch the way you targeting them, duplicate and narrow the audience group based on different interests or actions, boost content across multiple audeinces and keep testing different things until you’ve got the best possible result… and then carry on testing! People’s attitudes and behaviours change all the time, you need to adapt to that to make sure you’re serving relevant content to the right people.

What does your audience look like?

Talk to your audience

Social is a great way to change the narrative of someone’s experience with your brand. If someone’s had a negative experience, they’ll often look for the most direct and quickest route to get to the brand which, more often than not, is social media. It’s THE tool to use to turn a complaint into a positive relationship between the consumer and the brand. We’ve seen complainers become super fans enough times to know how valuable good community management is. So check hashtags and mentions through listening tools and make the most of the people who are already talking about your brand.

Consider the next best action
What’s the purpose of your content? To grab someone’s attention? That’s great, but now what? You’ve got their attention, now you need to deliver the next step before they get bored, forget or someone else takes that attention you’ve worked hard to grab. This could be as simple as a call to action driving them to a landing page. It could be through retargeting ads to get those interested in your product back to your website. It could be through longer form blogs with relevant, UX friendly add to basket options for products featured in the post.

Remember it takes time
It can be difficult as a brand to see other brands or competitors raking in the followers, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and 10,000 followers aren’t grown overnight – unless they were, but bought faux followers will only damage not help your brand. Spend time interacting with prospective followers, run awareness ads to get your brand front of mind and grow a real audience of consumers who will actually go out and buy your product. You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, and in today’s social economy, follows are a valuable currency that consumers need convincing to give away. Think about what you’re offering in return to make sure prospective followers feel like they’re getting something tangible in return.

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5 New Year’s resolutions for brands on social

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