In marketing, social networks present additional channels of communication. They are places where your potential customers spend a lot of time. Most of them love shopping and to engage with their favorite businesses in many ways. It would be illogical to miss this opportunity for brand exposure and sales growth.
Still, its hardly efficient to be present on all of the social networks, time and money-wise. So, different social networks are offering different promotions and different audiences.
Well, there is one exception which is Facebook. It is almost like a universal network. Most importantly along with Google, it offers the most powerful online ads platform.
A LinkedIn business page is also a must-have nowadays. It’s an awesome platform where you can show your brand values, recruit new quality employees and create a possible network of business partners.
All the other networks are unnecessary but each brings a number of benefits and is unique for every type of business.
Start by identifying your goals and creating a social identity
The first step anywhere is establishing and defining goals. With defined goals, it is easy to measure success and react quickly if your campaign is not producing satisfying results.
Without goals, it would be hard to truly measure success and return of investment. Also, sales results are not everything. For a new business or e-commerce on the market, it’s equally important to let people in your geographical area known that you exist.
Your social network goals have to be inlined with a wide digital marketing strategy. That way the efforts you put in social networks are going directly toward achieving wider business goals. Of course, most of us here work for ourselves. This is more important for bigger companies because your budget and overall ROI depends on the success of your digital marketing strategy.
S.M.A.R.T Goal is a good metric to follow when establishing goals. It means: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bond.
Content strategy
There are many misconceptions about how to create an effective and unique content strategy. Most advice that you can find over the internet is useless. Because they are not giving you actual advice about how to create quality content. Something that will organically spark interest in people.
There is no social strategy or tool that will help you with content creation. When it comes to tools, all I can tell you is that social calendar tools like Sprout Social can offer some help thanks to their listening tools. Listening tools will give you an insight into your content. More importantly, you will see what your main competitors and industry leaders are posting. What type of posts are the most popular and have the biggest engagement?
This can help you with strategy and to quickly learn about new industry trends.
So, then how to have good content?
Good content should not be about your product most of the time. You don’t want to annoy people with constant product promotions as well.
Tons of people would not follow someone’s Facebook business page unless they really like their content.
Many social media managers are trying to solve this problem by Googling funny images, memes, gifs, famous people’s quotes and such. This will get them some likes maybe even some really popular posts. Problem is that you can’t earn money with likes. You need to attract people who are interested in your brand or that will get interested because of your brand values. You don’t want to attract some random people who like your image just because it’s funny. That image doesn’t say anything about your brand.
They will have no knowledge of your brand or desire to even see who posts it.
Ideally, visitors and followers of your social media channel should only be customers or potential customers.
The story will not be any better if a professional marketing agency is managing your channel. They have graphic designers, video editors, and social media managers… They will make a content strategy for a month in advance. So, they will make like 3 posts a week presenting your product in different situations. It looks nice and all but…it’s boring and does not represent your brand values. Just pushy promotional content.
So, will you finally tell us what to post????
You had to understand the bad practices first. Now… finally… and the answer is very simple. Communicate your brand values.
This is what I do first when I create a social media strategy for a client. I ask their manager or we try to establish brand values together. Write down 5 to 10 values that a brand should project. Those are universal human values, it’s not about a product at all.
Then you just create content for every one of those values. Some will fixture more often and some content you will share only a few times a month. It will also depend on the social networks that you have chosen.
Let me show you an example, so you will understand this better:
Let’s say that you are managing a Facebook page for a company that makes homemade honey.
What are your values?
Home Made – product comes from nature and is transferred to jars cheerfully and by worker’s hand.
Healthy Food – food is organic from healthy honey bees. You do not put any sweeteners or anything that those industrial makers are doing.
Old People’s Wisdom – Old people have experience, wisdom and see solutions that young people do not see.
Returning to Nature – Getting away from the noisy, polluted urban environments.
Ethno Culture– the beauty of historic music, craftsmanship, recipes and such.
Good All Times– nostalgia for the times when everything was more natural and organic.
Childhood– back to a much happier times
So, what content we can create from this?
- An old image of something historically important that happened in one of your country’s cities or smaller towns. Just a photo and a short copy. Then make an ad from a post and promote it only to people from that town area. They will like the photo and will appreciate your brand for mentioning their hometown.
- An old women’s short life story and her advice. Similar to ‘’Humans of New York’’ Facebook page.
- Image of an old workshop, talking about a grandfather always working on something. An emotional hook.
- An old recipe, video from someone’s actual home. Nobody has to talk about your product. It can be used in a recipe sometimes.
- Ask people to share their old images. Or images where they use your product in a right way.
- share images of interesting destinations from your country.
I could write many more of these post ideas. Point is, that you can see how an organic non-promotional content can be created from brand values. Your business page now has a soul. It is different from others and people do not feel like they will be bombarded with promotional, uninteresting content.
Actually, they will look forward to seeing your next post.
