The path to a successful social media marketing strategy is never easy. There are a lot of pieces to put together such as identifying your goals and audience, the best platforms and tools to use, the most suitable contents to post, and many other things. However, it is not impossible. When you look online, it seems that some brands and companies are doing great on their social media campaign. They have a strong online presence, high engagement on their posts and obvious increase of a number of followers, likes and shares. Some may be acquiring SEO services from expert digital marketing agencies. Others may have invested a lot of time and effort into learning the best social media marketing strategies.
Whether you are a small or a big business, you might also be asking, “What are they doing right that we should also do?”. If you already know the do’s in social media marketing and you think it’s enough, think again. You should also know the things to avoid and anticipate challenges you might be facing on your social media journey. To give you a heads up, here are the most common social media marketing challenges and tips on how to solve them accordingly:
KEEPING THE ENGAGEMENT
You might have scheduled a full month’s content to post on your social media pages but it is not enough to keep your audiences engaged with your brand. One challenge on any social platform is keeping your audience interested and connected to your brand or business. Tailor fitting your content for your target audience is important but there is one more thing that you might be missing to keep them engaged. Authentic connection is what you can bring to the table. Do not just create or post relevant content for your audience, connect to them as well on a personal or individual level. Make sure that you respond to each comment in a personalized way on all your social media channels.
You may also build niche-based forums, communities, or groups. This way you can connect to them by asking questions specific to their problem or needs and address it appropriately. Apart from that, they could also give you a bunch of ideas for your next content. If your audience feels that your brand has that genuine concern with them, it would be a pleasure for them to interact with your brand, react to your posts and share them, leave a comment and tell their friends about your company.
STAYING ORIGINAL
Another challenge of businesses who want their brand to be recognized in social media is maintaining their originality. There’s a lot of competition online, as well as copycats. To become different from your competitors or become an industry leader, you must build your own identity. Focus on improving and maintaining your brand’s personality. Your brand should have a unique tone and voice. This can be achieved by how you caption your post or by the appealing text you put on the photos, as well as the thumbnails of your videos.
MAINTAINING QUALITY OVER QUANTITY
Most social media channels would experience a drop in organic reach or the number of people who see your content or page without paid promotion or distribution. When this happens, you might think that the solution is to increase the number and frequency of posting content. Hold your horses! Think it through before you waste a lot of time and effort creating as much content as you like. Not to mention the possibility of your audience to be irritated with your numerous posts in a day.
The solution to this is to check the best content you posted that has a high engagement. The metrics will tell you that this type of post is appealing to your potential audience. Repurpose it by converting it to a different type of content such as videos, live stream, or GIFs. Lastly, boost that repurposed content by paid promotion. Instead of paying content writers or creators for fresh content, investing a few dollars on your most valuable, relevant, and quality content would be more worth it.
STAYING ON-TRACK
Social media marketing strategies provide you with ways on how to accomplish your goals. But before you get there, you need to set your goals first as you might be lost along the way if you don’t have one. Everyone’s ultimate goal could be to earn from your social media campaign but dissecting specific goals one at a time till you reach the ultimate goal would be smarter. This is why you need to apply the SMART goal setting guide. Start with having specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound goals. This will solve the challenge of social media campaigns losing on-track and prevent you from creating irrelevant content, exceeding the set budget, and wasting time on minor metrics.
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