7 Ways to Use Social Media for Better Growth in 2020

According to a report, “90% of social media users have already used social media as a way to communicate with a brand or business.”

No doubt, implementing a well-thought-out social media strategy can help your business in many ways, especially by facilitating better customer interactions.

However, with the changing algorithms of Facebook and Instagram, the emergence of Snapchat, and the preference for LinkedIn by professional communities, it is a fact that social media is not static, and you cannot rely only on emojis and hashtags to propel your social media marketing strategy. 

To get the best out of these channels, it is vital to be dynamic and watch out for social media trends, while also integrating some time-tested strategies into your marketing plan. Here are seven tips that will help you leverage social media to boost brand awareness, grow your customer base, and truly delight them.

1. Keep Tabs on Your Competition

Competitive analysis on social media helps you analyze where you stand with respect to the competition and draw inspiration from their strategies. Use social media smartly to learn from your competitors and see if you can tweak any of their strategies to achieve your business goals.

If a company is doing better than you – say, it has more customer engagement and fans on its page – there must be something they are doing right. 

To discover their secrets, you can use the Free Facebook Competitive Analysis Report that can compare up to 10 fan pages with up to 250,000 likes. The detailed report gives you an overview of the pages, followed by various graphs that compare engagement on different types of posts and other essential metrics. 

2. Track Social Media Mentions

Whenever people talk about your brand or product on social media – whether positive or negative – that constitutes a brand mention or social media mention.  

Brand visibility is an obvious benefit of social media mentions. However, brand mentions can also be leveraged to improve your customer service by reaching out to unhappy or inquisitive customers. 

As more and more people prefer to use social media as the first point of contact with a business, brands that monitor social media mentions can respond to these mentions promptly, leading to higher engagement and customer satisfaction rates. 

According to a Twitter Marketing Report, “When a customer Tweets at a business and receives a response, they are willing to spend 3–20% more on an average priced item from that business in the future.”

If you are wondering how to track your brand mentions, use Awario, a dynamic Twitter monitoring tool, or Mention for real-time monitoring on multiple platforms.

To ensure a seamless experience, you can integrate live chat on your social media platforms to ensure users can reach out to you easily and swiftly, without being redirected from the platform they are using.

3. Use Relevant Hashtags for Greater Visibility

Hashtags became popular on Twitter but soon spread to other platforms, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google Plus. And for a good reason, too. Hashtags work to categorize your content for users, and when used in the right manner, they help interested users find your content easily.

Using hashtags seems as easy as placing the # sign in front of your keywords. However, it is essential to think about the hashtags you are going to use, as your customers may never discover unique or long hashtags.

In general:

• Use one or two impactful hashtags for best results
• Keep hashtags short and memorable
• Don’t use unusual words, as no one would be searching for them
• General terms drive better results

Wondering how to choose the right keywords?

Start by monitoring what the influencers in your field are using to promote their content. You can head to Buzzsumo to identify the top influencers in your niche and scan their content. Other, more direct, tools include RiteTag, which offers instant hashtag suggestions, and Hashtagify.me that lets you search for trending hashtags.

4. Emulate the General Trends Popular in Your Industry

Every industry has some set patterns for marketing that resonates well with the audience. For example, the financial sector is currently focused on simplifying financial concepts for its users in order to generate more interest in insurance and investment-related products.

However, the top players have moved on from creating lengthy blogs to short explainer videos that are visually appealing and highly engaging.

Through competitor analysis and monitoring the content created by influencers in your niche, you can observe the most popular trends in your industry and incorporate them into your social media strategy for better results.

5. Use a Social Media Monitoring Tool for Social Listening

Using social media is a great way of connecting with your customers on a platform they are already using. However, most customers use multiple social media platforms, with most preferring one over the other, making it difficult for brands to track customer feedback, social mentions, and discussions.

A simple way to tide over this issue is by investing in a robust social media monitoring tool that allows you to manage multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard.

Awario is one of the best tools for online media monitoring that monitors your keywords on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, news, blogs, forums, and the Web. The best part about Awario is that it offers both real-time monitoring and historical data in addition to customizable reports for actionable insights.

6. Reach Out to Micro-Influencers for Brand Awareness

Not every brand has pockets deep enough to engage celebrities like Kim Kardashian for influencer marketing. Fortunately, you have the option of collaborating with smaller, niche-based influencers, also called as micro-influencers.

The good part is that micro-influencers have a better ability to engage an audience as Takumi reports engagements rates go down with an increasing number of followers.

One of the most straightforward tools that you can use for identifying the most-effective micro-influencers for your brand is HYPR. The tool is free for the first 100 searches and gives you plenty of data on hundreds of influencers in any given niche. 

7. Maximize Conversions On Social Media

Generating high-quality traffic is not enough unless you can convert that traffic into paying customers. Use social media to boost your conversion rate in two simple ways:

• Include a Strong Call-to-Action (CTA) - Never forget to integrate a strong call-to-action that tells your customers what you expect them to do after reading your content. An appealing CTA will encourage your customers to take the desired action, which could be signing up for a service or purchasing your product or service. For example, notice the Facebook cover page for Amazon Prime Video. It informs the users that the new season for Jack Ryan is out and encourages them to watch it now.
• Offer Some Freebies - Everybody loves discounts and freebies. Organizing a contest or giveaway on social media is quite entertaining and encourages customers to interact with your brand in the hope of winning a gift or discount. Here's an example of an Instagram contest run by UpWork.

Conclusion

The social media landscape is continually evolving, but the tried and tested strategies outlined above will serve your business well for years to come. 

Now that you have a better understanding of various social media strategies, it is time to invest in a multi-platform social media marketing approach and drive positive results for your business.

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