How do businesses keep up with social media? Consistent quality posts and market research is a great place to start, but in this guide, we are going to address in-depth strategies to build and retain a social media following.

Post Consistently and Predictably

Finding a good balance between keeping your potential customers aware of you but not irritated by the frequency of posts is essential to optimizing your social media growth.

Determining what that means for your individual business is often going to involve a trial and error period followed by analytics-driven informed adjustments.

While it may seem daunting to have posts going out at a set time, tools like later.com an auto-publishing service can make the entire process automatic instead of worrying about timing their posts, busy business owners can focus on their business.

Post Unique Content For Each Platform

A mistake a lot of business owners make when advertising is repeating posts, or not putting enough effort into content that is going out, this is an extension of your brand and needs to be quality in order to lead to conversions or grow your audience.

Recycling content means people who are following you on more than one account are going to keep seeing the same posts and be significantly more likely to unsubscribe.

Be Conscious Of The Platform Demographics You Are Posting To

A good strategy is to choose a couple of platforms that you want to advertise on and create posts specifically for the trends, demographics, and/or culture of the platform.

Retention is just as important as new followers, making sure not to alienate current followers will help to mitigate potential clients unfollowing. Try to avoid excessive use of first-time exclusive deals to prevent previous clients from feeling like they are not valued as much as new customers.

Research and Utilize Trends and Hashtags

Research is important to understand why certain posts did better than others. A massive benefit of utilizing trends and hashtags is that it can get you in front of individuals who otherwise wouldn’t have seen your content which is the hardest part of growing a following.

While it may be tempting to use generic hashtags and copy them for posts, using market research and unique hashtags and verbiage will see significantly better results and conversions. Google has a keyword planner that breaks down effectiveness based on a large variety of demographics.

A great way to get an idea of the industry you are competing in is to check out your competitor’s campaigns, and marketing strategies. Focus on businesses that likely own more market share than your business.

Use Previous Posts to Determine the Most Effective Posts and Direction for your Business

Asking yourself about the efficacy of previous campaigns can lead to great insights into the kind of advertising culture that is effective and should be cultivated for your business.

Some good questions to ask yourself include:

Did your audience giveaway posts justify their investment of time and money?
What posts are causing you to lose/gain the most followers?
Are Surveys effective for you?
How often should I post?

Consider Paid Advertising Not Paid Followers

Often effective, it is always relative to the cost of the advertisements, if you are willing to pay and stay on top of the results, paid advertising can give you a significant boost to traffic, followers, and leads. A mistake some businesses make is they pay for followers, which actually hurts because your posts get extremely low interaction because your number of followers is inflated comparatively.

Follow Influencers/Collaborate

An easy way to build towards your branding and niche is to reach out to clients, family, friends, and affiliates in your industry. Additionally, this helps to keep an eye on trends as well. This is the groundwork for doing brand collaborations or sponsored content. By collaborating you share your audiences and in effect mutually benefit, for this reason often they are free, or inexpensive.

A people search engine can also be used to find influencers that you may be able to collaborate with. This is a great way to get your content in front of new eyes, as well as to build relationships with people who have a large following. When looking for influencers, be sure to consider their audience and the type of content they share. You may also want to reach out to them directly to see if they would be interested in working with you.

Hire Professional Representation

Running a business is a serious time commitment and often some of these steps will fall through the cracks, if you feel this is true for you, your best option may be to hire a professional digital marketing company so you can focus on your business and check with your representation about your goals and regularly check-in to make sure things are going smoothly.

3 Emerging Marketing Channels You Might Not Know Of

Keeping up to date with new marketing strategies may appear daunting, but staying on top of trends is essential to understanding the demographics of your potential clients. A strong strategy is to build a versatile approach through diversifying your channels. Regardless of what method you find most effective for you, utilizing multiple channels is ideal for brand awareness and growth.

Short Form Video Content

The titans of industry, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are all seeing a massive explosion of success. Viewers favor the direct nature of the short-form content, and savvy content creators can take advantage of this by packing high-quality content into a short period of time. Additionally, posting regularly is essential to retaining viewers, as viewers are expecting regular, quality content. An interesting choice that is collectively adopted by these platforms is the lack of or in YouTube’s case removal of the dislike feature. This is a reaction to algorithms becoming more efficient at determining what content the viewer wants to see, based on previous video interaction time, likes, shares, and other factors. However, from the marketer’s perspective, this allows for significant risk mitigation in ad campaigns or any form of promotion.

Live Streaming

Live streaming, an increasingly popular pastime for children and young adults, has grown exponentially in the past couple of years and is not projected to slow down for the foreseeable future. As more companies see this as a marketing opportunity we continue to see rapid growth for sponsored streams, content, and more.

A recent data-mining scandal surprised a lot of people when it revealed that top streamers on Twitch.tv make well over 20 million dollars a year without accounting for sponsorships or donations. The reason these streamers are valued so highly is because they command a lot of attention from viewers for hours at a time and develop a surprisingly personal relationship. This results in streamers being more effective at driving traffic to given products or services due to the rapport that has been created. While the market share for streaming is becoming more varied, Twitch and YouTube are the undeniable major platforms.

An additional benefit of advertising through twitch is because the ads are controlled by the streamers themselves they can choose ideal times to show ads. However if you want to advertise but do not intend to make video ads you still have options, such as promoting content as part of the stream overlay for streamers. As this channel continues to grow we can only expect advertising to expand as well.

Web3

What is Web3? Simplified it is a decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain technology. Meaning that this is the all-encompassing platform for an ever-growing collection of digital goods and services. Hosted within it, the Metaverse focuses on virtual and/or augmented reality concerts, meetings, and more.

What is the difference between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality? Virtual reality replaces reality, meaning creating the entire environment that you experience via a headset, whereas augmented reality adds to your perceived reality with an appearance similar to a UI or HUD.

A major contributor to the popularity of Web3 and the Metaverse is the explosion of cryptocurrencies and NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) or a unique digital asset. Often taking the form of digital art, music, or even videos. With crypto and digital art becoming increasingly well known, it is not hard to imagine a time where people interact, buy, sell, and trade all within a digital landscape. NFTs are also expanding into a way of confirming identity, for example, a frontrunner in the NFT marketplace is a series called Bored Apes, after seeing significant success, the people behind it have launched a Yacht Club, where annually people who own one of these digital assets come together to network and party.

How To Utilize These New Channels

More so now than ever clever marketing tactics can get significant traction, incorporating your brand in trends on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts can get massive amounts of eyes on your posts for little to no cost, and due to the shortened duration of these platforms, the content creation process is notably shortened. The real challenge with short-form content is being interesting while not appearing unprofessional since the culture around these apps it is expected that creators will be direct to the point and full of energy. This is often opposed with a lot of more conventional marketing strategies.

Live Streaming is pretty direct comparatively and offers more options in exchange for creative influence over how the product is pitched. By putting the promotion of the product or service on the streamer, picking the right one can be challenging. A great method of ensuring your incentives line up with the streamer is by creating a custom link where the audience is incentivized (via a discount) to use their specific link and have a small percentage of the profit go to the streamer. This is also a very useful tool for tracking the effectiveness of future promotions.

Web 3 is a lot more complicated in how it can be utilized, that isn’t to say that it is not worth learning about, it offers lots of lucrative options and will continue to expand for the foreseeable future. One common example is promoting a collection backed up by an influencer or celebrity, such as Ozzy Osbourne’s CryptoBatz collection currently valued at 6,377 Ethereum or about 16 million dollars. While there is a way to make money from the royalties on the NFTs in the collection, as a marketing channel this is a great advertising tool for building a brand due to the ability to build brand loyalty through mutual benefit and ownership.