Social media is a crucial part of your marketing strategy. It can help you generate buzz around your products and your brand by having users share your content. But social networks are incredibly busy and filled with stimuli. With so much going on, how do you make sure that users will find your content throughout all this mess?
With a quick audience analysis and a few simple tips and tools, you can be on your way to tailoring your posts to make sure users can find them easily. Here are 7 tips that can help you increase your social media content visibility.
1. Know Your Audience
Your target audience may change or evolve as your company grows and adds more products. It’s important to know who your target audience is before you get started on social networks. You should have basic demographic information on who your users are, especially age, location, gender, and interests.
Social Media networks, such as Facebook and YouTube, offer powerful ad platforms that will allow you to discover which demographic groups are interacting with your posts the most. If these are the groups that you are targeting for your product or service, great! If they are not quite what you are targeting, you might want to adjust a few keywords to increase the chances that your posts will be found.
2. Are You Using The Right Social Media Networks?
Different target groups will use different networks, so it’s important to figure out which networks are more appropriate for your social media strategy. The goal isn’t necessarily to be active on all networks, but to be active on the ones that matter the most for your users.
For example, a younger demographic will tend to use Instagram and Snapchat, while an older demographic will tend to focus on Facebook.
You also want to make sure that networks you use make sense for the type of content you are sharing. Instagram and Snapchat are highly visual platforms, which are great to showcase your product’s physical attributes or to give personality to your brand.
Twitter, however, focuses more on the latest info about your brand to keep users updated and have one-on-one communication with them.
Make sure you know which platforms serve which purpose so that you can select the ones that are compatible with your marketing strategy.
3. Keyword Research
If your audience isn’t being reached on social networks, your keywords may be too general. For example, if you are advertising for a law firm, try adding specific keywords that outline your expertise (Ex: immigration lawyer).
If your business has a wide target audience, you should perform a keyword research to see what your users may be searching for. A keyword research will help you find more popular specific terms and show you what people are actually searching for.
To step up your keyword research game, use a keyword research tool to find keyword ideas, search volume data and competition scores.
Our keyword research tool Twinword Ideas can additionally help you filter keywords by user intent (know, do, buy, etc). This will make it easy for you to tailor your content to your target audience, and to where they are in the buyer’s journey.
4. Hashtags
Not to be confused with regular tags, hashtags also enhance users’ ability to find your posts, especially on social media. Hashtags can be used to tie your posts to a particular topic, but they are often most effective when you want to tie your post to a specific current event, situation, campaign, trend, or discussion.
For example, this tweet includes a #learnWithGoogle twitter hashtag which is used to tie tweets and posts to Google’s various workshops at different events.
Hashtags will make your company seem relevant and up to date about what’s going on right now. Further, they will increase your chances of inbound organic referrals as users are searching for that specific hashtag.
Popular hashtags create a hype and a sense of belongingness that make people want to use the hashtags themselves. This is fueled by word-of-mouth, which is a free organic way to get your content shared online.
However, this only works if the hashtag is relevant right now. While the #MarchMadness2015 hashtag may have been very popular in March 2015, adding such a hashtag now will have no effect as it is no longer relevant at this time.
There are various social media tools available to look up current trending topics that you can include in your social media marketing. But, make sure that your hashtags are related to your post’s content.
You shouldn’t add irrelevant hashtags to your posts just because they are popular. Otherwise, users may get confused about your product or your brand. If you are out of hashtag ideas, you can make use of tools that automatically generate useful hashtags for you based on your text’s content.
However, don’t overdo it. Hashtag stuffing is not recommended, as it will make your post too busy and make your company seem desperate.
5. Just Ask
Another great way to increase your social media presence is to ask your current users to follow you on your other platforms. As Hubspot claims, you’d be surprised as to how many followers you can gain that way. Rather than asking your followers to follow you on a specific platform, you can create one link towards all of your accounts using Linkkle.
Screenshot of Twinword’s Linkkle Profile
Using this service, all you have to share is one link which will prompt the user for which networks they want to follow you on. This is especially useful on Instagram as only one link can be placed in your bio.
6. Appeal To Emotion
People tend to share content that they have found useful or that had an emotional impact on them. If you want to make your followers work for you, your social media content should appeal to emotion. Preferably, you will want to portray positive emotions to tie these emotions with your brand.
Create a clever ad that will make your audience laugh, or change real people’s lives in meaningful ways and document it to share it, such as Wesjet’s Christmas Miracle video, which went viral shortly after it was posted.
Done right, your audience will not need to find your content; your content will find them, as people will share your content with friends and family.
7. Interact With Your Followers
Social media is all about building relationships with your customers. The key difference that makes social media special in your marketing strategy is that it allows for two-way communication with your customer. Use it!
Although you probably want to gain as many followers as possible, it is very important to develop meaningful relationships with your customers. By doing so you can ensure happy customers and positive word-of-mouth.
To engage with your customers, you can for example post a general open-ended question (that is at least somewhat related to your business) in a post that would invite users to comment to answer. This will make you seem more human and, if you picked your question correctly, you might even gather valuable insights on what your customers think about your brand!
When your customers leave reviews about your products or services, make sure you reply to as many as you can, whether the review is positive or not. This will show that you are listening to your audience and that you value their opinion.
And if the review is negative, you should go dig deeper to find out why. People trust advice from friends and family (known as word-of-mouth) 67% more than advertisements. So, if you have an unhappy customer, this is your opportunity to turn things around and avoid having them attribute a bad reputation to your brand. Invite them to chat with you and offer a suitable solution.
You can also launch a contest or promote a giveaway by asking your users to share the contest/giveaway post with their friends. Again, this leverages important word-of-mouth from your followers and increases the reach of your content.
There’s More To It
We hope that with the help of our 7 social media tips you can increase your social media visibility, and make it easier for your target audience to find your content.
As users find your content more easily, your posts can get more shares, and the search ranking of your webpage can improve due to your increased social media traffic.
But search result rankings are also determined by other factors. If you’re new to SEO check out these beginner tips to make sure your pages are optimized for a better search result ranking.
