Grow your business with social media

Sahail Ashraf posted on 11 April 2022

Social media is only ever going to be a tool for marketers. It’s how you use it that counts. Stop wasting time and grow your business with these tips.

If you’re looking at your current social media strategy and wondering how it can add to business growth, worry not. There are plenty of things you can do to ensure your work on social media helps to build your business. 

The goals

Most businesses don’t actually have goals for their social media marketing work. Instead, they just try to follow the latest trends and hope their posts and campaigns get noticed. But goals are absolutely essential if a business is to make use of social.

As long as you keep your goals realistic and manageable, you should be able to use them to power growth. Here are some examples of social media marketing goals that may help your business to move forward.

1. Increase brand awareness through social media. Your brand must shine through in your content if you are to grow. So avoid the usual stuff of pushing products and selling services. Instead, spend the majority of your time on social media getting the brand’s personality across. Your audience wants to know more about your values and the people behind the brand.

1. Generating sales. You wouldn’t be in business unless you wanted to generate sales, right? So maybe this goal is for you. You can use social media to go beyond brand awareness and introduce products on your feeds. You can also offer special deals exclusive to a platform. 

1. Traffic. This is the easiest and perhaps most obvious of goals to develop and follow. You can use social media to drive traffic to your website and then convert those visitors to customers through that website and any other assets you have. This goal can be tracked easily through monitoring clicks and your traffic numbers with your metrics platforms.

The research

If you don’t understand your audience, you can’t grow your business. This means that you must be able to have a firm handle on your data.

You already have a lot of information about your audience that will help influence your social media marketing strategy. All you need is the right tools. Use a platform that gives you all the data on your audience, including engagement for each post, so that you begin to get a clear picture of what your audience likes. 

Pair the platform data with data from your other channels, such as email marketing, and you will have a solid picture of what your audience likes. Then, just give them more of it.

KPIs

Take a look at the metrics below:

• Reach. This is how many unique users saw your post. Is it reaching people’s newsfeeds?

• Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. It’s important to figure out what drives people’s curiosity or what makes them buy.

• Engagement. How many social interactions a person has is divided by how many impressions they get. These things tell you how your audience perceives you and how they’re willing to engage with you.

• Hashtag performance. How are you with hashtags? Which ones work best for your brand? The answers to these questions can help make your content more relevant going forward.

These metrics actually matter. Rather than worrying about how many followers you got last week, you should focus on how many clicks you got, for example. This is all about meaningful engagement. Have these as your benchmark figures and you can focus on what will grow your company.

The content

This one may be of no surprise to you, but it is also perhaps even more relevant this year than ever before.

There is so much throwaway content out there, whenever you see a social media post that is genuinely unique it stops you in your tracks. And that is the key. Unless you take your time and put in the effort to create truly helpful and unique content you simply won’t be noticed.

This goes back to the social media calendar. Planning out the content you are going to deliver carefully, so that it spans a six-month period, means that you can work on your best content with a deadline. You can plan the amount of time the content will take to create and the people involved. 

Doing otherwise, as in simply creating content as and when you feel the need, or endlessly reposting other brand’s content, is just not going to get you anywhere.

If you want to grow your business using social media, focus on the above. It might mean a change of perspective or even a new way of thinking about social media, but business growth starts with change.

Are you a social media marketer? You need Locowise in your corner. It gives you all the data and metric management you need, all in one place. Contact us for a try.