By Adam 
Your social media is important for getting your business in front of more consumers and generate more sales whether it is on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Fortunately, it is possible to transform your currently lonely social media accounts into thriving communities bustling with activity if you follow a few simple tips.
Get ready for an explosion in your popularity in the coming year. Here are 6 tips for improving your social media in 2019.
- Using the Proper Tools
If you wish to improve your social media presence, it is important to post often on social media and at the right time. Studies actually show that the optimal number of times for businesses to tweet per day is 15. As a business owner, you probably don’t have enough time every day to constantly log in to all your social media accounts, which is why you must invest in the proper tools.
Using post scheduling tools can help you stay active on social media while saving you time too. With Buffer, it is easy to manage all your social media accounts in a single location, schedule posts way in advance, post at optimal times when most of your followers will see them, and analyze the performance of your posts. Using tools that help you to effectively manage your social media accounts ensures that you post regularly enough to improve your social media presence.
- Focusing on Customer Service
Social media is the new frontier when it comes to customer service. Instead of calling a business and waiting hours if not days for it to respond to an email, customers who are having issues are now turning to social media to get help from brands. 54 percent of customers actually prefer using social messaging channels for their customer care needs over traditional channels such as email and phone.
So, rather than just focusing on selling so much, you should focus more of actually helping people. Using your social media platforms to offer customer service helps send more users to your social media profiles and makes it easier to solve the problems that they have or encounter. You can even create a Facebook chatbot to be answering questions whenever you are not around. Customers are also more likely to buy from you of they know that you can help resolve their issues quickly. And this will help you have a more positive presence online
- Promoting Your Social Media Accounts
You should not assume that your customers know about all your social media platforms and that they go searching for them. It is up to you to inform them about their existence. If you make it easy for customers to like or follow your social media profiles, then they will be more willing to act.
Start promoting your social media accounts to customers and ask them to interact with your brand. You can add your social media feeds to your sidebar, add social media icons to your website, tell people to follow you on social media at the end of blog posts, and use your email marketing to promote your social media accounts. The higher the number of people that know about your social media presence, the greater it will be.
Social media SEO is also a good idea as it helps you to promote your social media accounts in the Google Search results. This can help with everything from reputation management to gaining more followers to improving your ultimately getting more customers. You can read more about Social Media SEO here.
- Paying Close Attention to What’s Trending
One of the most effective ways to create a larger social media presence for your business is piggybacking on the popular trends on social media. It will help get your profile in front of numerous users that never knew about the existence of your business and may even help your posts go viral.
You can easily stay on top of trends by taking a look at what’s happening. For instance, you can see the top trending hashtags on the left side of Twitter’s homepage in the Trends for You Section. Look at the hashtags you can use to get additional views. It is advisable to use hashtags that actually relate to your business, but they don’t necessarily have to be strictly relevant. If your finance company is able to create a fun post for #NationalDonutDay, you should definitely go for it.
- Focus on Captivating Visuals
It can sometimes be hard to get noticed in the increasingly crowded social media feeds, which is why it is so important to make your business stand out. Using captivating visuals is one of the most effective ways to stand out on social media and increase your presence.
Try avoiding using too many boring stock photos. A better approach would be to share images that connect with users. Share high-quality behind-the-scenes images as well as people using your products. You may even share photos of your customers interacting with your product/service with their consent, which also helps create social proof.
- Actively Engaging with the Audience
Would you continue talking to a person that has never returned your messages? You probably wouldn’t. Users will not want to follow you on social media or even interact with your brand if they don’t get something in return. That’s why you need to actively engage with your social media audience.
If you wish to create a social media presence, then your social media accounts have to first become a community. It means that when someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, it is important to reply to them or at least like the comment. You can even pose and answer questions in posts as well a show your appreciation to customers and followers by thanking them and sharing content generated by users. Engaging with followers not only boosts your presence on social media but also help you develop real relationships with customers.
Get ready for your best year on social media yet. If you follow the tips provided here, you will not only get more follows and likes than ever before, but you are also likely to gain more loyal customers too.
SME Paid Under
Digital Editor