Maintain Social Media Presence

How to build a social media presence?

1. Set SMART Goals: The concept of SMART goals has been around for decades, but they are so important to your social media presence today.In short, brands should set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

• Specific: "We’ve specifically identified the social channel (Twitter) and a metric (response rate)."
• Measurable: "The response rate can be measured from the Sprout Social dashboard."
• Achievable: "We didn’t make an outlandish goal of say, a 100% increase in 10 days."
• Relevant: "Our goal will have an impact on our overall social media presence, making it very relevant."
• Time-bound: "The goal has to be met by the end of the first quarter."

2. Identify Your Audience: After you’ve outlined your goals, you need to outline your target audience.Maybe it’s prospective customers. Perhaps it’s industry players and influencers. Either way, breaking down your audience will help you figure out the following:

• Which social media sites you’re active on
• Your posting schedule
• The type of content you publish
• Your brand’s voice
• The information in your profiles

Many brands spin their wheels because they don’t post content that speaks to a defined audience. Spend some time looking at your audience personas, understanding what their challenges are and what brands they already love via social. This sort of competitive analysis can help you understand how your own social media presence can stand out from the crowd.

3. Share a relationship: If you’re not exactly sure where to start when it comes to relationship-building, here are some quick ideas:

• Always @mention people you reference in your social media posts
• Answer questions people ask
• Reply when people @mention you or share your content
• Don’t just Retweet and Like other people’s content; reply with a comment to start a conversation

4. Focus on helping:

• If your followers ask a question, you should respond in a timely manner.
• And if your followers seem to be buzzing about a particular problem, you should craft content that speaks directly to it.
• By offering solutions to problems instead of just pitching your products all the time, you’re proving your company is an authority and potentially earning a lifelong customer.

The importance of maintaining a social media presence:

• Brand Awareness
• Authoritative Brand Image
• Authentic Branding
• Engagement
• Support

Tips to improve your social media presence :

• Use the right tools: If you want to improve your social media presence, you need to post on social media often and at the optimal times. In fact, according to studies, businesses should be tweeting 15 times per day. But as a business owner, you don't have enough time in your day to constantly be logging in to all your social media accounts. That's why you need to use the right tools.

• Focus on customer service: Social media is the new platform for customer service. Instead of giving a business a call or waiting hours (sometimes days) for a company to respond to an email, many customers who are having issues now turn to social media to get help from brands. In fact, 54 percent of customers prefer social messaging channels for customer care over phone and email.

• Promote your social media accounts: Don't expect your customers to know about all your social media platforms and go searching for them themselves – you've got to tell them they exist. If you make it easy for customers to follow or like your social media profiles, they'll be more willing to take action.

  Start promoting your social media accounts to your customers and ask them to interact with you on your profiles. You can add social media icons to your site, add your social media feeds to your sidebar, tell people to follow you on social media at the end of your blog posts, and promote your social media accounts in your email marketing. The more people are aware of your presence on social media, the bigger it will be.

• Pay attention to what's trending: One of the best ways to create a bigger social media presence for your business is to piggyback on popular social media trends. This will get your profile in front of a ton of users who never knew about your business before and could even help your posts go viral.

• Focus on eye-catching visuals: Try to avoid using too many boring stock photos. Instead, focus on sharing images that will connect with users. Share high-quality behind-the-scenes photos and people using your products. You can even share your customers' photos of them interacting with your product with their permission, which also creates social proof.

• Actively engage with your audience: If you want to create a social media presence, then your social media accounts need to become a community. That means when someone comments on your posts, you should reply to them or at least like their comment. You can also pose and answer questions in posts, and show appreciation to your followers and customers by thanking them and sharing user-generated content. Engaging with your followers will not only increase your social media presence, but help you develop real relationships with customers.

Ms. Saloni Jain is an expert in this field and she has written informative articles that provide people the required information about Bohemian Lookbook