Social media amps up your ability to connect with people, build relationships, and gain business.
Since hitting the scene, social media has turned marketing on its head, shifting the advertising megaphone into a two-way conversation with customers. The real-time opportunity to tune up customer care and meet people where they are is game-changing and community-building.
And with the massive numbers of people online at all times and engaging on multiple social platforms, it’s no wonder businesses are finding their customers in the digital space, 24/7.
Making your business or brand explode means creating a sustainable community around you. A community that supports you and your products/services, plus offers social credibility. Yes, it’s true your digital reputation indeed stands to grow with steady and effective social media marketing.
Social is a public display of your good work, showcases positive feedback, and, best of all, telling about yourself is replaced with an opportunity to SHOW it, especially when others express it publicly on social media platforms.
It’s fun (and good for business) when you find people sharing your content, sometimes on channels you aren’t even on. Having social share buttons is still okay!
The Social Media Grapevine is Your Friend
This social media grapevine helps amplify and distribute your content to attract new visitors to your website, create awareness and interest, and solidify your brand message. But today, you need to reconsider ‘driving traffic to your site,’ with the idea of building your community by leveraging each social platform in unique ways.
Yes, changes in organic reach from social channels and platforms are (as usual) of concern, but as always, pivoting is part of business, and social platforms are in constant flux. Therefore, it’s not necessarily that these platforms aren’t working; it’s just that they keep changing. We need to change with them.
This post takes a look at social media from an organic growth perspective. Is that still possible?
Social Media Growth, Organically
- Is it possible for social media marketing to help your business in all the ways mentioned above?
- Can you reach your goals organically, or is that a thing of the past?
- So what is working now, or not working anymore?
- Perhaps most importantly, how can you measure results to prove social media works?
When I started looking into social media, and not too willingly, in about 2015, I discovered this quote from content marketing expert Jay Baer, “Content is fire. Social media is gasoline.”
And since then, I’ve learned this to be true.
Lighting the match to start the social fire honestly works, I find. But it’s also usually a slow burn before it ignites or explodes, not only for my social channels (which often get the least attention) but from working with client accounts in a slew of industries over time.
Social media was the combustible first spark helping me get noticed for my writing work. And then to get first clients. Social sent me an (oddly) high percentage of website traffic, but things are changing, and the same tactics and thinking won’t work anymore.
“Start pushing the buttons” is what someone suggested back then. (Still a good idea, once you select your core platforms.) But, there’s a better way to gain traction faster. As a step-at-a-time endeavor, things start happening by simply chipping away, testing a channel at a time, and participating.
Social Frameworks Are Still Important
Try this framework for building customers and an engaged community with social media marketing:
- Assessment/Review + Goals/Objectives
- Understand the Customer Journey
- Evaluate Channel Options
- Create a Content and Channel Plan
- Develop a Distribution and Amplification Strategy
Working in tandem with business goals and within your more extensive marketing campaign, be sure your social media plan aligns with your audience’s needs, making it value-added from the user’s perspective at every turn.
Align Social Strategy with Business Goals
In an interview with Ross Brand, Michael Kinney says that social media is still a fundamental way to get eyeballs on your work, but the idea is for people to want more of you. He explains that it works in tiers to build your audience and a community interested in your work.
“You have to take a sober assessment of what you’re doing.” ~Michael Kinney
In the interview, Ross Brand wisely reminds us, ”Social metrics and business metrics aren’t the same things.”
From Joie Gharrity’s point of view, “For my personal/professional brand, it’s [social media] a consistent billboard! I don’t think there’s a better microphone out there than social media.”
Joie suggests you:
+Cross-pollinate.
+Share your unique point-of-view.
She continues, “I’m not promoting for anyone to get off social media, but understand it’s a two-way street, so it’s important to engage with people.” And beyond engaging with people, Joie also explains how it’s important to shine the spotlight on others. I agree with shining the light on others who inspire you, and do this all the time to share value and wisdom from others I learn from.
When you focus on and strategize your social marketing plan around key business objectives and goals, the content you create plays a part in moving people toward doing business with you.
A Novel Idea: Publish on the Platforms That Work for You!
The social platforms you select to work with should reflect where your audience or market hangs out. This is especially relevant in the speed-of-light digital space where your time and viewers’ too, matter.
Assess and Review
But the first step to getting this right is to understand yourself.
Do you have a solid foundational direction for your business and a widely understood mission to clarify your purpose and direction? Have you researched and assessed the bigger business or industry landscape and conducted a competitive analysis? Looking to what others do in your space helps you understand differences and highlights your business over the competition.
Maybe you can leverage a gap to introduce something no one else has!
Whether you sell products or services, or anything else, a deep understanding of what you offer, inside and out, helps you communicate with your customers. It also allows you to understand and identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or Unique Value Proposition (UVP) to distinguish how you stand out in the market and position yourself.
And finally, understanding yourself, products, and services intimately reveals how you serve people and effectively convey your value to paint the picture of the transformation someone feels because they picked you to do business with!
If you don’t set clear goals with a business purpose in mind and act without a definitive objective, you’ll never reach your target or achieve specific results. While working from a strategy with actual KPIs (key performance indicators) set by business goals takes a little extra thought and time upfront, it’s worth it.
Understand the Customer Journey
Customers experience your business in stages, so it’s essential to provide content that attracts and makes them want to return for more. And more. Hopefully, even more. Until they buy something you offer. You can accomplish this by acting as a professional publishing house for your company. In doing so, set yourself/business up as a go-to resource for what visitors are interested in and what you offer.
I like looking at this process by combining the “marketing funnel” with the “buyer’s journey” for a melded approach to guide content types and direction. Seeing it in this overlapped view simplifies the concepts easily and sensibly.
When you stop and think about where the customer (or prospect) is and what content asset types apply in each phase, creating content for all the stages makes sense. Better yet, it trickles down logically, letting you build out content topics, getting deeper and more specific along the way.
Your social media strategy also gains a framework to amplify and distribute for a targeted and bigger content reach from your valuable library of content assets.
And of course, understanding the customer journey accurately using a description or audience avatar (customer profile) of your ideal client is a MUST.
Check out these resources:
Channel Options to Reach Your People
When businesses guess at the social channels to use rather than research them, they often miss the mark for the audience they are trying to reach.
Beyond basic demographics, for example, user intent is a major consideration. This entails understanding why a person goes to a channel, and asking what the person’s intent is for being on a particular platform.
When considering social channels, decide what type of content works best for each platform’s specs. There’s nothing more frustrating than content that’s cut off due to incorrect formatting. This means that content must be channel-specific for distribution and amplification on different social platforms. You may have to create peripheral assets around your original piece to share it more widely.
Customize content for each channel.
The other part of selecting proper social media channels for your business is that YOU are comfortable with the platforms you work on. So, if you despise doing videos, you may want to concentrate on a platform that isn’t primarily videos, like YouTube.
It’s all about finding the perfect match between audience, business, and resources, and where you excel in content creation.
Social Media is What?
Annnnnnd. Speaking of YouTube and referring to it as a social media platform, I’ve been polling around in professional groups and Masterminds where I belong to find out if people consider YouTube a social media channel or not. My findings so far are split.
Because it’s functionally a “search engine,” second in size only to Google (which also owns YouTube), YouTube yields power to drive traffic and offers a free place to house your video content. But do you consider YouTube a part of your social media strategy?
Undoubtedly, promotional and marketing videos for your business are part of social sharing and content repurp