Social media is an amazing way for your brand to engage with its audience. But, it’s a task that can take up a huge amount of time whether you’re new to it or not.
Listed below are 21 creative hacks, tips, and tricks to boost your social media presence and for you to get the best out of your social media strategy.
Hacks
Below are a few ways you can increase your brand’s social media reach by spending even less time.
1. Up Your Hashtag Game
Optimizing Open Graph tags on Facebook by web developers will leave you with more control over how your information is carried when someone likes or shares your content.
Another is the common phenomenon of hashtags we see everywhere. It is important to optimize them wisely using only the more relevant and trending hashtags for people to find your social content easily.
Use tools such as Hashtagify.me to check how your hashtags perform as well as find other related ones.
2. Build Relationships with Influencers on Social Media
Might sound a bit tough but making a connection with some of the leading industry influencers has many benefits. To start with you can do this by regularly sharing their content in the form of stories, tweets, liking their posts, commenting on them, etc.
This eventually leads them to notice you and reciprocate the positive encouragement you have been giving through one of the same means.
They may also check out your page independently and like your content enough to recommend it without you asking. This leads to an increase in reach for your brand as more people from a different audience would be checking your page through a person’s recommendation.
3. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Tools
Tools tie everything in together, especially when it comes to scheduling posts, posting, and helping you engage with your audience.
They integrate different platforms and give you one dashboard with everything to look at in one view. It’s time effective and also easy to comprehend, once you get the hang of it.
You can stick to any tool based on your current needs and goals. Some great free tools are – Hootsuite, Buffer, Canva & TweetDeck.
4. Do the ‘like’ for ‘like’
Your post inevitably will reach a bunch of people who don’t follow you. You can use this to your advantage by inviting those same people, who liked your post, to like your page.
This is also what makes Facebook unique as its business page is built for this and helps you retarget your audience easily. It also helps you consistently increase your likes on Facebook.
5. Get on What’s Trending
Make content on topics that are currently trending to attract more attention and eventually people to your page.
A great tool for that is Social Mention where you can track trending topics and hashtags in real-time.
That as well as Google News to find interesting topics.
Using these as a back frame to spark conversation and encourage people to share their thoughts, you can do as little as tweet about it to make your brand more visible and for you to reach out to potential customers.
6. DON’T be Selective
Share your content on all your platforms to garner maximum reach and engagement. You never know what resonates and with whom, so don’t try to limit your potential reach.
A great tool that enables you to share your content across multiple platforms at once is Viral Content Buzz.
7. Engagement is Key, But Not at All Times.
While engaging with your audience is great it is also something that takes away from your valuable time. Engagement is important but shouldn’t be at the top of your list among other things.
Replying to direct messages, responding to comments & tweets take up a huge chunk of your time.
For that, find ways to multitask or set out only a specific number of times you’ll take out to engage with your audience.
8. Pay attention to Off-Page SEO
While a major chunk of your audience is on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn’t mean you only stick to those platforms. Your potential audience may be on sites like Quora & Reddit and may just be easier to convert.
These sites provide honest and unfiltered feedback to your content as well as drive traffic to your website.
Beware though, these platforms usually don’t like a lot of advertisements so you’ll need to engage in a way that suits them best.
9. Twitter can be Your New Best Friend
Twitter is a site that’s often used as an additional promotional tool, however, many brands need to tap into its full potential.
Twitter can be harnessed by jumping on hot topics without even having to produce a ton of content for it.
Twitter can be used to test out potential ideas and then used as a base to make content on.
This gives you an idea of what your audience is interested in and what they’d like to see from you. This could just be retweeting and analyzing your audience’s reaction.
10. Use ‘Stories’ to tell a story
Utilizing the stories feature of Instagram to take your followers behind the scenes of the action. This could be an insider look of your brand, product, or service that they wouldn’t normally get to see. Even packaging is something that people deem as ‘satisfying to watch’.
Giving this exclusive content to your brand makes your followers feel like they’re part of one big group.
Stories are a great opportunity to test out even unique and different content. You can see your followers’ reactions by their shares, views, and even results of polls, etc.
Tips & Tricks
11. Reuse & Recycle
Though it doesn’t sound like the most appealing idea, resharing content (or revamping and sharing content) that garnered a lot of views and popularity in the past draws new attention to them.
This saves time and uses posts you know have worked in the past.
12. Infographics
Infographics are a great way to explain information in a clear and visual format.
Don’t forget to include the brand’s logo and social media presence, this will help with brand retention when people share the post.
Another tip is to ask those sharing your infographic to link the image back to your website to garner more traffic.
13. The Secret of SlideShare
Slideshare is a great opportunity for you to use the several presentations you’ve made to link back to your website.
Hours of presentations made for brands go on a hard drive where you don’t really look at it again.
Instead, you can embed your Slideshare in your blogs, once uploaded, and share it at a conference or have it linked to your other work.
14. Leverage on ‘Added Value’
Offering value services is what keeps people engaged and maintains brand retention as people not only engage with your content online but save it offline.
Added value services include free booklets, ebooks, free webinars, exclusive videos, consultations, discounts, etc.
15. Reviews are Everywhere
Reviews aren’t only on mainstream sites such as Amazon or Flipkart, your potential customers could look you up on various sites, and it’s important to have a good presence on that.
You can do so by encouraging customers to leave a review on these sites or directing links to them yourself.
These sites could be Google Reviews, Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc.
16. Live May be the Future
Did you know that live videos are 80% more preferred than blogs?
Your audience wishes to engage with you without much effort on their part and live streams are a great way to grab their attention for a long period of time.
This could mean more behind-the-scenes content, interviews, and exclusive brand events.
17. User Generated is Key
People want to find people who look like them that use the brand or engage with the brand. User generated content is excellent in doing just that.
It shows your potential audience that your current audience looks just like them. Moreover, they are much more likely to trust the word of someone who is human rather than a brand page.
This gives your audience honest feedback directly from customers rather than a brand promoting their products.
18. Utilize the power of Look-Alike Audiences
Once you have a clear strategy you can use paid elements to amplify your reach. Lookalike audiences are those audiences that are similar to your ideal customers.
Facebook makes this feature a lot easier to utilize having multiple targeting and retargeting options available.
19. Follow a Calendar
A social calendar isn’t just an additional step to your marketing strategy, it’s an important one. Posting on a consistent basis is what makes your audience still follow you and retain their attention.
Making a schedule helps you keep everything organized and ready for the weeks to come and helps you save time.
20. Reposting your Followers Posts
If your followers are going to engage with you, you need to encourage that thoroughly by sharing their content back.
Brands that have a higher number of followers, especially, need to practice this more often as these retweets or re-shares can be an exciting moment for the follower.
Either way, it’s more exposure and a lot more engagement.
21. Go Visual!
Lastly, make use of your platform’s ability to visually present content in the best way it can.
Images, GIFs, and videos create more appealing posts and make users want to know what it’s about.
It’s also a fun way to integrate your product and mix it up once in a while.
