Staying afloat in the rapidly changing world of social media is essential for small and large businesses alike.
With major shifts predicted in the ways in which up-and-coming companies portray their brands to the world if your team isn’t in the know, your social media marketing plan could lose ground quickly.
Keep the following tips in mind to ensure that your web presence continues to optimally represent your brand.
Connect with the Modern Consumer
While once maintaining a professional image and a formal business tone was a must in consumer interactions, that may no longer be the case. Modern customers expect a more interactive experience, prioritizing personality over traditional professionalism. To ensure that your social media presence caters to your audience, make sure that you keep a touch of humanity in all of your interactions. While communicating with customers and potential customers, keep a light, friendly tone, and don’t be afraid to throw in a little humor.
Develop Your Social Media Personality
What do your social media platforms say about your business? If all you do is sell, consumers aren’t going to be attracted to your page. In addition to advertising your product, it’s important to give your followers a reason to keep coming back by continuously posting engaging and intriguing content. If you don’t already have a social media manager, then add it to your budget for 2015. By hiring a dedicated social media manager, you can ensure that consumer questions and comments are always acknowledged and responded to in a timely manner.
Choose Your Content
By 2016, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, so tailor your upcoming content accordingly, integrating video along with your marketing endeavors. By posting consistently in video format, already you can significantly increase your shareability, potentially sending your content viral. To keep consumers engaged, switch it up every now and again by restructuring your traditional content into infographic format, spicing up text-heavy information with graphics and videos.
Amplify Your Content
If your content isn’t reaching its desired social media audience, then you’re wasting valuable marketing opportunities. To boost social media campaign success, more and more businesses are turning to paid amplification, contracting third-party apps and tools to ensure audience compatibility. Growing brands in the content amplification industry include Edgar and Contently, both of which help small and large businesses alike to create marketable content, utilizing algorithms to schedule status updates and release content for optimal visibility.
Go Mobile
Keeping your pages compatible with smart technology is important as record numbers of consumers take to the mobile web. Major sites are already creating pages and online tools that are mobile-ready, utilizing a simplified, uncluttered design. Since your social media pages are third-party hosted, they are already set up to accommodate a wide spectrum of mobile devices. If you link through your social media platforms to landing pages that are not compatible with mobile devices, however, you will discourage mobile web users from visiting your links in the future.
Keeping Your Checkout Up to Date
Keeping your sales platforms up to date with the latest in mobile checkout and online currencies is a must. If it’s a payment, take it. Merchants on major e-commerce sites such as AliExpress, for example, already accept bitcoins, and the word on the street is that Amazon will soon join the club. Also teetering on the brink of popularity are mobile wallets.
As smartphones become ever more integrated into daily life, they could replace traditional wallets during the checkout process. Already contending for the lead in the mobile wallet race are Apple Pay and Google Wallet. By tailoring your checkout process to accommodate these alternate forms of payment, you can give your store an edge over other less obliging retailers.
