There are 800 million people on Instagram, nearly one billion on Twitter, and two billion on Facebook. How then is it possible that your awesome content—the writing and visuals you’d spent hours perfecting—got only one or two likes? You thought social media marketing (SMM) was supposed to be a surefire way to generate new leads and build a strong customer base. What went wrong?
The truth is that social media marketing can do all that, but no one said it was easy. If you’re experiencing problems as you try to create a strong following on social media, you’re not alone. In fact, 55% of business owners that begin social media marketing campaigns as part of their New Year resolutions become disheartened by mid-February, sending out less and less content. Soon enough, these business owners find themselves with a dead Facebook page or Twitter account—and anxiety at the mere thought of logging back in to either.
But successful social media marketing takes persistence and flexibility. Instead of giving up on your dream of a vast and engaged online audience, you need to adapt your strategy.
At The Go! Agency, we often work with clients who come to us at a loss. Their social media pages just aren’t getting any attention. After reviewing their current strategy, we often find room for improvement—and more often than not, they have very common, fixable issues.
Here are a few techniques that may breathe new life into your social media marketing:
1. Focus on content, not promotions.
When it comes to social media marketing, there is a common misconception that every piece of content is supposed to generate leads. However, the right SMM approach will be much more subtle. The point of social media is to build customer-brand relationships. The best way to do that is to offer content they will actually want. So whether you want to create an information-packed blog or share how-to videos, creating and distributing content that your customers actually want to consume will do wonders for your engagement.
2. Study your performance.
If you experienced a significant slump in numbers, you can gain valuable information from your previous attempts. It might be time to head to your old data and try and decipher what worked before. Did engagement change when you deviated from a successful formula for content? If that’s the case, then you may have to go back and incorporate some older ideas. Did your formula remain the same, but your audience drift away? That probably means that you’ve saturated (and bored) your audience, so you’ll need to shake up your strategy. Change things up at the content and audience level. See what works, and go with it.
3. Spend money to make money.
Here’s the hard truth: you get what you pay for, every time. You should budget for social media advertising, whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The good news is that you can quickly see the advertising’s impact on engagement. You may be tempted to go it alone and use “word of mouth” to spread your message organically, but you will soon see that promoted content has the potential to reach a vastly larger number of prospective customers.
4. Reassess Your Conversion Funnels.
Like any marketing professional, your ultimate goal will be getting those customers to complete transactions. But what would be the customer’s next logical step for such a wonderful thing to take place? Clicking a link, of course. But where are you sending your audience? To your home page, your blog, anywhere at all? You need to figure out where your desired traffic is going and what they’re doing when they get there. Install Facebook tracking onto your site to see if customers are moving onto the next level of engagement: liking, sharing, commenting, or focusing on your site. This will be a big help to see if the landing page (the page to which your links direct traffic) is giving you the results you want.
Social media is an amazing opportunity for brands to present themselves to a wide array of potential customers in an attractive light. However, sometimes you need a serious shake up to get results. That’s where a team like ours at The Go! Agency can help. Our team of marketers will help you every step of the way, no matter what. There’s no denying that social media marketing can be a roller coaster, but with the right team of professionals at your side, the ride isn’t quite so scary.
