10 Actionable Tips to Make Social Media Work for Your Brand

Marketers and business owners want to have their brands be on their customers’ minds. To do this, one must strengthen the brand and make it known through various marketing platforms, including Social Media.

Here are important expert tips on how you can strengthen your brand and increase brand recall among your target audience.

1. Know Your Audience

Who is your target market? Where do you find them? What interests them? These are just some of the questions that will help you identify who your real audiences are. Due to the vastness of the digital world and the various array of digital platforms, many marketers and business owners fail to define their target audience.

Before making any efforts on social media, it is best to understand and know your audience. This is just like creating a product or service. To whom are those products and services for? The information you may need could go beyond their names, ages, and locations. Understanding your audience also includes knowing their activities, points of interest, favorite things, hobbies, purchasing capacity and more.

Successful marketers or business owners need to ask these questions about their audience:

• What products or services do they need?
• What is the reason for the purchase?
• How to reach out to these people?
• How much are they willing to spend?
• Where do they most likely make the purchase?

2. Choose the Right Platform

After knowing your target audience, then you will know about their behavior and their buyer’s journey. Now that you can identify where you can find them. From there, you need to choose the right platform.

Are you gaining success on the social media platforms you are active on right now? Chances are, you may not be using the right platform in the first place. These platforms may not provide you with the right access to your audience.

There are various social media platforms you can explore:

• If you need to interact with professionals and share knowledge, LinkedIn could help you with that.
• Is your business related to fashion, style, home ideas and the like? Pinterest could be your platform.
• Facebook is the most used social media platforms these days, so you surely do not want to miss out on the opportunities there.

3. Interact with Your Followers

Statistics have shown that there are 68 million active Twitter users in the US alone and 55 million status updates are made every day on Facebook. You surely do not want to disappoint your audience. Achieving this goal is more than just posting new content on your social media or sending likes to their comments. It is best to interact with your followers on social media.

Here are some tips on how you can interact with them:

• Create the right content which your audience will love and that will capture their interest.
• Respond to their comments on your posts.
• Send a reply to their private message. Auto-reply message is okay but should not be encouraged because it seems like a robot is talking to your customers.
• Respond in a timely manner, preferably within a 24-hour timeframe.

4. Acknowledge Your Mistakes

We are humans after all. We all screw up. The more you admit mistakes, apologize and act on it, the more your customers will appreciate your brand. It is tough to admit social media mistakes, but it could be more difficult not to resolve them, especially in the digital arena where everyone has access to practically anything.

Here is what you can do to fix this:

• Acknowledge your mistakes.
• Apologize to your audience.
• Offer a solution.

5. Stay Active and Post Regularly

When you created your social media account, you created it for a purpose, right? And that is to reach out to your customers. But how can you reach out to them if you only update your site once in a week or post a photo once every month? You will definitely be forgotten.

The frequency of your posting depends on your target audience and what they may need. It may no longer be a hassle on your end updating the social media pages all the time because there are tools which allow you to schedule your posts. Some of these include social media monitoring tools including Hootsuite, Mention, ManageFlitter, and Buffer.

6. Do Not Ignore Negative Feedback

Your customers can say both good and bad things about your products or services – and that is perfectly fine. Feedback from customers, be it positive or negative, can be used by a marketer or a business owner to improve his brand.

Based on research by Forrester, 64% of the brand experience is negative and gets a rating of “poor, just fine, or extremely poor”. Only 37% of this is considered a great customer experience.

If there is a negative comment from a customer, acknowledge it by replying immediately to it. There is no perfect formula in handling negative customer feedback, but you can try doing these easy tips: LISTEN, ANALYZE and ACT.

7. Manage Declining Organic Reach

Have you been noticing a decline in the organic reach of the Facebook pages you manage over the years? This situation started back in 2014. Facebook’s Vice President for Advertising Technology, Brian Boland claimed:

“Over the past few months, I’ve read articles and answered questions from many people who are concerned about declines in organic reach for their Facebook Pages.”

There are two reasons for this decline:

1. Too many articles published on Facebook which increases the competition for posts in the News Feed.
2. Facebook tries to show people the content that is most relevant to users despite all the surfacing content available.

There is nothing to worry about because you can deal with the declining reach. Here are some of the things you should do:

• Be selective with your posts and switch to targeted and selective publishing.
• Inform Facebook fans that there is a feature on Facebook wherein they can update their notification settings.
• Use engaging videos and share them on Facebook.
• Go “live” on Facebook.
• Hit the right target with your paid advertisements.

8. Monitor Name Mentions

A “Mention” is a specific reference to someone in a particular post. It is unforgivable not to notice name mentions as notifications will be sent to you when someone chooses to refer to you. Mentions can be done by typing @ followed by the name to be mentioned.

Make sure to be on top of your name mentions and respond to them accordingly. On Twitter, you can check the mentions by searching @username in the search bar. On Facebook, look for your brand and search it using the search bar. The results will show all the mentions when you choose the “posts by everyone” option.

When you monitor your mentions, you will know what users think of your brand. You might find both positive and negative mentions, but that’s alright either way. Categorize the importance of these mentions and respond to them the right way. There are various mention-monitoring tools you can use to help boost the strength of your brand which includes SocialMention, Trackur and more.

9. Be Consistent with Your Branding

A strong brand is the one that is easily remembered. It leaves a mark with people. To make your brand easy to remember, there should be a consistency with the branding.

Brand consistency means keeping a certain level of uniformity in your brand. All the means of communication, means of message delivery and offerings must be in line with the core brand strategy of a product or service. Making your brand stand out and the manner by which a brand is promoted successfully depends on how marketers or business owner want it to be.

Take for example the success of Coca-cola. It is one of the strongest brands in the world. It focuses on brand consistency as a strategy and aligns this with the company’s overall objective and standards.

10. Build Connections with Influencers

Boost your social media presence with the help of influencers. As a marketer or business owner, it is your goal to get more people to your site and drive them to take action.

Influencer Marketing focuses on key leaders or people with many followers who are actively helping drive up the brand’s message. This type of marketing can be done on various social media platforms, email lists, YouTube accounts, and among others. As claimed by a study, influencer marketing results in doubled sales, performing even better than paid marketing. Word-of-mouth truly takes you a long way.

Being the fastest-growing online customer-acquisition method, influencer marketing increases the reach and noteworthiness of a site.

Over to You

Your brand is more than just a memorable logo or an enticing color scheme. It is more than just having a great endorser. Your brand is the result of all your business efforts combined.

What do you think of these tips? Let us know how you make social media work for your brand.