Many years ago it was unthinkable that a brand could have some type of interaction with its public. I refer to “interaction” because it implies a bi-directionality.
Historically, brands were the ones to speak and the public would listen; there wasn’t a real conversation, instead there were two very defined roles: the sender (the company) and the receiver (its public).
When the internet and social media appeared, everything changed. Now, brands and public can communicate and talk to each other, with no restrictions of time or space. And, even better, companies have infinite resources that allow them to evaluate the quality of each started conversation and each sent communication in a detailed manner in order to improve the relationship with their users, get more clients, and to turn a lot of them into brand advocates.
The cliché phrase of: “information is power” applies perfectly in the social media environment, where everything can be measured, analyzed and act in consequence.
A Statista graphic details user growth in social media in the last years and what is projected for 2021: growth is not stopping, which means that every time more and more users will be seeking interaction with your brand through social media.
Even though social media is used in the social environment, they are also business allies to help directly reach its public. They are an incredibly valuable source for interaction, which wouldn’t possible in the physical world, or do you really think that you could gather all your clients in an event and talk with them every day?
According to Smart Insights investigation (2018), the two most popular activities on the internet are to browse in social media and watch videos. Also, almost one third of the world’s population uses social media in a regular basis (eMarketer, 2016). If you have a business, there is a reality that you can no longer ignore: your business needs presence in social media.
How to boost your business growth through social media?
Surely, more than once you have seen the typical ads with specific brand messages towards you in the news feed of your favorite social media platform. Those ads were thought out by marketing professionals with a goal and specific public segmentation to give high exposure to its communication.
After paying a specific amount, they are targeted by the platform to all the newsfeeds of people that match the target established by the brand. Investing in ads is a great strategy to boost the reach of your content but, are there ways of growing your brand without paying?
Of course there are: through an organic growth.
Organic interaction
Let’s start from the beginning: how do you plan on increasing your visibility on social media? Your brand needs a content strategy. You must know which attributes are the ones that require more visibility and in what moments. For that, we recommend you make a list of all the products or services you offer, important dates for your business, for the industry and for related events. With that in mind, you will be able to start thinking towards where you want to aim your communication on social media.
In Workana, for example, besides always knowing what aspects of our product we want to communicate the most, we also have a list of all the important dates for our market, in order to always pay attention, make related content and to trigger interaction between the public and our brand.
This is very important because you cultivate the relationship with users and potential users from different edges and not always trying to sell: you provide added value.
Where to start:
The first thing you need to do is to create your business’ profiles in social media that best fit the public you wish to reach and also considering the popularity of each one.
If you’re just starting, you will have to look for people to follow you. You can ask your contacts to follow you on social media or you can also look for people interested in your brand or industry, carefully verifying the description of their profiles and interacting with them to get them interested in your brand and therefore having them want to follow you to stay updated with your news.
Once you have a follower database (even if it’s a small one), you can start observing their behavior and obtaining data such as the time and days of higher connection, just as we do in Workana to enhance the impact of our posts.
We will walk you through some examples with our Spanish account because it’s been working longer. But, we encourage you to follow us on our English accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Tips by social network
A study from the Pew Research Center (2016) indicates that nearly 80% of people online use Facebook and, until June of this year, it had more than one thousand million daily active users and two thousand million active monthly (Facebook, 2018).
As we mentioned before, considering important dates for your business and industry can make a difference and take the relationship with your public beyond buying your product.
Let’s take a look of a specific case that brought us amazing results on Facebook. Even though emoji day is not strictly related to our business, we are a digital platform, and we can’t deny that emojis are always main characters there.
This is why we thought of an original way of relating this day with our brand and create interaction with our public:
Image translation: When a client says “I want to make an extra logo” (not included in the original budget)… what is your favorite emoji?
A simple poll in Facebook reached almost 3,000 people. Being creative is essential to boost your organic growth.
And, this social network has many resources you can advantage of: pictures, videos, polls, stories and many more. You can even do online transmissions for your audience, just like we are doing on a monthly basis in Workana, and they are the posts with the best results of the month.
A Facebook live we did in August, for instance, had marked a reach of 11,000 people the following day of the post.
Linkedin:
Did you know that the average Linkedin user visits the platform an average of 17 minutes per month? (Wordstream, 2018). This means about 30 seconds per day, so, you have to really think out your messages to truly catch your public’s attention.
It’s the professional social network by excellence, far from the informality of Facebook or Instagram, the posts in Linkedin touch work and professional growth subjects and, it will always prioritize content of this style.
It is very important that your brand is here if your intention is to show yourself as a responsible employer or if you are in the work market industry.
In Workana, for example, we are in the remote hiring of professionals industry and that’s why we can’t stay out of this giant of professional connections. In our case, we share articles with tips for entrepreneurs who are pushing their business and can help themselves boost their growth.
Even though images and videos are the resources with the highest impact nowadays, we opted for more reflexive and detailed posts, because they have worked better for us with our goal public.
This is an example where we got more than 3,200 impressions and when we checked all the posts we found out that there is a tendency towards a bigger impact in those posts with more text and without pictures or videos. Of course, press notes also have good results and specially those posts where we share job openings in our team.
Image translation: Do you know everything that a law expert freelancer, like Carolina Gómez Cardozo, can do for your business? When we think of remote work, we immediately think about hundreds of typical freelance professions which activities are strongly related to the use of technology: web programmers, designers, digital marketing specialists, remote support assistants, writers and editors, etc. But, not only those technology-native profiles can be benefited from the many advantages of remote work. Every day, there are more professionals from other areas who are finding the way to change the paradigm and to migrate to the freelance environment to have better opportunities and to push growing businesses. We invite you to get to know everything that a freelancer expert in the Legal area can do for your business!
A practice that has also been working out amazing for us has been to start the communication with a question that makes the reader reflect. Think about those posts that you can’t help but click on in order to find out how they continue… that’s the intention you must seek when doing your own. An example of this, with more than 1500 impressions is:
Image translation: Did you know that the amount of businesses hiring freelance Social Media specialists increased by 32% last year? It’s not casual. Social media has a key role in increasing a company’s visibility and in interacting with their public. And what better way than to have an expert professional freelancer to manage your business’ social media accounts? In order to work with a freelance Community Manager in the best way possible, we have chosen some tips to help you establish an efficient collaboration:
– Thoroughly and carefully analyze what type of image you want to transmit with your brand. Who are your clients and what do they want?
– Define the social networks that you believe your brand should have presence on.
– Decide on the tasks that the professional will manage and comply with.
From here you can look for a social media expert right away:
https://lnkd/TntmCK
We also recommend you to add specific hashtags of the content because depending on the language in which your public has their Linkedin setup, they will be able to search for hashtags and it’s always good to leave that door open for them to find you.
Detecting what your public likes and how they like to consume that content will help you start building a strategy aligned with what they are searching for and to think about creative ways to present it in order to have more impact. Here you will see how our followers increased throughout the year.
Your business can’t be missing out on Instagram. It’s certain that you will have to analyze in detail who you want to get to and with what type of posts, but it’s very important that you pay attention to the social network of the moment, which reached a thousand million users in June of last year. (TechCrunch, 2018).
Instagram has a differentiator: it’s visual. Different from the other social networks, you can’t upload content without having an image or a video. In this aspect you must pay close attention because the aesthetics of your brand will begin to play a very important role. We recommend you to have a designer to help you create professional images.
Besides the posts that will be uploaded to your profile, you should take advantage of the stories: 300 million users interact with them every day (99Firms).
They are a great tool to transmit short messages to your public, show a 15 second video or an impactful image to make them continue learning about your brand in a different place. In Workana we use them every day to send different messages to our freelancers and entrepreneurs and, every month we can observe the impact they are having. In this graph you can see a marked difference from the moment we began using them on a daily basis and the amount of impressions (or visits) they had:
Today, there are 400 million users creating stories on Instagram every single day (Statista, 2018). It’s a great opportunity for you to do the same and to also explore the ones from your public to interact and share them.
On the other hand, another activity that we practiced some years ago was contests. Almost every week (or on some special dates) we make a post for people to answer and participate for a specific prize. We put all the comments in the Sortea2 site and a winner is chosen randomly.
Some time ago we were doing it on Twitter, then Facebook and now on Instagram. The goal is to motivate the interaction with your followers. Below you can see an example where, in 3 days, we had 66 comments and we reached 2100 people, which is almost half of our followers:
Participate in our draw of the week to win a PREMIUM ACCOUNT!
Twitter:
Even though Twitter has decreased its popularity in the last few years, it’s a social network where last minute information resides. There, you can connect not only with your public, but also interact with the media, be an assistant in the big events of your industry and be up to date in the latest news to be the first one to share them and generate conversations.
Image translation: Friday is here and it’s contest time! What new skills would you like to gain this year to be a better professional? Maybe Photoshop, adwords, programming, some language? To participate you must: Follow us, Like this post, Answer the question in the comments. Last Friday’s winner was @dani_mich
Twitter will allow you to get known among the people that interact with you and with the hashtags of your area. Therefore, we recommend you to identify them and to search on a daily basis for the subjects that are trending so you can participate actively, just like we do in Workana:
Today, this social network has more than 300 million active users Statista, 2018. You can’t ignore the opportunity of gaining notoriety in your industry!
Tips to apply on all social networks of your business
- Follow hashtags related to your product and industry to find people and organizations, follow them, interact with them and share links of interest.
- Check out the activity times of your public to make your posts during those hours. On Facebook and Instagram you can see them through your profile’s statistics.
- Share your own content and also other’s content. Your public is interested in knowing more about you but it’s not always good to just talk about ourselves. Sharing other’s content will help you establish your place in the industry and to show that there are also other entities that defend the principles of your brand or industry.
- Get to know your public to find the appropriate tone when communicating. In Workana we use a lot of humor because we’re a warm and friendly brand (just like Latin America). That’s why we like our communication to have this same personality impregnated. In this point, it will be fundamental that you understand the culture of your public and to analyze what type of posts were more popular to replicate that style.
- Interact with the answers you receive. Go beyond the “like”: ask questions to people that commented your posts, search for their interests, invite them to share and to tag others, motivate them to interact with you!
- Establish priorities among the networks you choose. It’s not necessary to be in all of them, but you do have to analyze which ones will be priority for you public and to think about the strategies with this in mind.
- Analyze your actions and the impact of each post in order to understand the type of content that your public likes the most and, how to present it to boost your results.
- Add your social media links in your other communication branches to remind your public that they can find you and interact with you there.
Now that you have a clearer idea of how to use your social networks to become more visible in your industry, it’s time to begin!
Undoubtedly it’s a job that will take time, compromise and con persistence. Your public needs reasons to follow you and for that you need to build a source of interesting content.
You can’t be left out of the digital world. Only in 2018, the amount of businesses that hired Social Media professionals increased by 32% compared to 2017:
If you want to learn more about a Community Manager’s work, you can read this very complete article which we just recently wrote.
We recommend you to work with incredible social media professionals so that they can help you boost your business creating the best strategies. Create a project now talking about your needs and you will start receiving thousands of proposals from expert freelancers.
