Social media is an excellent resource for businesses that enables easy interactions between you and your ideal customers. There are many of them for you to take full advantage of.

However, these social media platforms are ever-growing and changing to improve their algorithm and user experiences. So, best practices need to be adjusted and navigated by marketing teams.

In addition, most businesses are already on social media competing for your ideal customers’ attention.

So, how can your brand stand out from the competition?

In this post, I’ll take you through some of the social media best practices to consider.

Keep in mind that there’s no “one way” to do it, but there are certain things that you should be doing to maximize your social media presence.

1. Create Your Strategy by Setting Clear Goals

When building your presence and brand on social media, it is important to have a defined plan from the scratch on what you expect from the platforms.

Setting these goals helps you stay focused on what is important and avoid the noise.

Some common social media goals for businesses include:

• Generate leads
• Increase brand awareness
• Drive traffic to your website
• Encourage community engagement
• Gain market insight through social listening

The options on social media can be confusing and may lead you to engage in ineffective strategies. However, well-defined goals will help you stay on track and measure your strategy’s effectiveness.

Basing your social media strategy on your goals is a good way to ensure a clear path ahead. 

You’ll get clear on the platforms that suit your business, what to post, how to interact with customers & the important metrics to keep track of.

2. Know and Understand Your Audience

Most businesses fail on social media because they simply replicate another successful brand’s social media strategy without understanding their target audience.

You can understand your audience and their needs by taking the following steps.

1. Identify or create your buyer personas. If you already have buyer personas for your business, you can also use them on social media.
2. Find out where your audience is most active.
3. Check social media monitoring tools to help you gain more insights into their interests to inform your content strategy.
4. Look at what your competitors are doing on social media and how they interact with their audience.
5. Interact with existing customers and have them take surveys to give you more information to help with your social media strategy.

Taking the time to identify who you’ll be creating content for and interacting with is one of the social media best practices that will allow you to create the right content for your audience.

3. Keep Your Messaging, Mission, and Values Consistent

Your business’s mission and values are a compass to help you stay on track and ensure that you deliver the best to your customers. They will come in handy on social media, helping you avoid practices and content that don’t align with your values. 

Crafting your brand messaging is also important to ensure that you connect with your ideal audience. It helps you define what’s important to you and your audience and find a unique way to communicate it.

Apply the same messaging, mission, and values across all social media platforms you’ll use for your business. Doing this will keep your brand cohesive, and your audience will easily connect with you. 

4. Schedule Your Content and Visuals in Advance

Different platforms require a variety of posting frequencies at specific times. Posting at the right time helps you target when your audience is fully engaged on social media. 

It encourages more engagement, prompting social media algorithms to show your post to more people. In addition, keeping up with your platform’s posting frequency will help you grab more people’s attention.

However, this is easier said than done. You may not get the time to post consistently every day. 

So, using social media tools like SocialPilot can help you schedule your content to stay consistent. 

Social media scheduling platforms allow you to plan your content and visuals and set when the posts should go up.

Remember to repurpose content you have created before to make the creation process easier. 

However, don’t copy the post word for word. Instead, refine it by changing its delivery format and adding new information to benefit your audience.

5. Ask For Feedback and Include a CTA to Boost Engagement

Feedback can revolve around asking your audience what they are struggling with or posts they’d like to see more of. Doing this will give you great content ideas more aligned with your audience’s needs.

Adding a Call-to-Action (CTA) to your content should tie into your social media goals. If you want to drive traffic to your website, your CTA should prompt them to visit a page on your website for additional information.

Similarly, if you want to drive sales to your new digital products, get more email subscribers or boost engagement on the platform, your CTA should reflect your goal. 

6. Answer Questions and Respond to Comments

Social media platforms are meant to embody the social aspect to ensure the success of both individuals and businesses. So, take time to answer people’s questions and respond to the comments on your posts. 

Most people prefer to work with businesses that engage in their posts and are readily available to address their customers’ concerns. You’ll lose credibility if you decide to just post and forget about your audience and engagement.

After scheduling your posts, set some time out to interact in the comments to build your brand name and credibility.

7. Audit Performances and Campaigns to Make Improvements

Are you still on track with your social media goals?

The only way to determine this is by auditing your performance.

If you’re on track, you can refine and improve your existing strategy. However, if you’re far from your goals, you’ll need to create a new strategy.

You can track different metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) on social media depending on the goals you defined earlier. KPIs in digital advertising will also help you keep up with the progress of your social media campaigns.

Some of the KPIs to check include:

• Likes, shares, and comments
• Audience growth rate (Follower count)
• Conversion rate
• Click-through rate
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
• Bounce Rate 

8. Keep Revising Your Brand Guidelines

All businesses should keep a set of guidelines both for brand voice and staff’s social media. 

While brand voice, style, and tone help maintain the consistency of your brand’s visual presence all over social media, staff’s social media guidelines help you structure the content posted by your team to align with the brand value. 

It’s a great way to represent your brand, prevent any confusion and consequences for violating the company’s terms, and helps with the company’s PR.

Revising these guidelines will help your company stay updated with the trends and changes needed to form a great online presence.

9. Cross Posting Across Social Media Platforms

Repurposing your content across different social media platforms with slight adjustments for the respective platform will showcase a qualitative side of your brand’s social media and content strategy.

For example, if you have a Facebook post that needs to go on Twitter and Linkedin, adding key points on Twitter and a summary of the post on Linkedin would help you create quality content and reutilize it in different ways without making it look copied. 

Generic strategies won’t help you grow your following, and that is why tailored content is what each social media platform requires to excel in meaningful engagement to attract traffic that will convert.

This strategy makes for one of the social media best practices that brands often overlook, but a slight change in your approach can make a lot of difference.

10. Use Social Media as Customer Service Channel

While social media platforms are primarily used for engagements and promotions, it is noted that social networking is also about satisfying your users.

70% of users on social media expect resolutions through your social media platforms.

Think about going beyond the generic posting and engagement. Combine social listening and a customer service mindset to help users resolve issues they may not have even reached out to.

Conclusion

Having an online presence for any new business in today’s time is a necessity. Your clients will mostly turn to social media to search for what they want and see what your business offers. Therefore, adopting social media best practices is important to position yourself better than competitors, which will win you more customers. 

Be creative, be unique, and be personalized on each platform to allow your users to see the efforts in your social media practices. Understand your audience, constantly engage them, take feedback, and bring out new content and creative ideas to connect and solve their problems. 

Once you have found the right balance across different social media platforms, you will slowly start seeing traction and algorithms work in your favor while managing organic reach and engagement with your users.

Melissa writes blog posts and articles for a wide variety of sites, from SEO agencies and online marketers to startup entrepreneurs and e-commerce websites. She aspires to keep her readers engaged and invoke curiosity while delivering solution-based content. She has prior experience working with magazines and e-commerce establishments as a content marketer and editor.