Social Media for Businesses: A 3-Step Cheat Code
Don’t know what your business should be posting on social media? Here’s a 3-step plan for creating a social media strategy that you’ll keep forever.
Why should your customers follow you on social media? A 2020 report by Marketing Dive says that a whopping 90% of customers buy from brands that they follow on social media. Not only is it a priceless way for brands to introduce themselves to new potential customers but it is also a way to service the relationship they have with existing customers with a human touch. Now that we’ve figured out the why, let’s move on to the how.
Whether you’re a B2B brand, a consumer good, or a service company, here’s a 3-step cheat code to creating a strong social media strategy.
Step 1: What to post
Step 2: When to post
Step 3: Where to post
The first step to creating a strategy for your brand’s social media is figuring out what exactly you should be posting in order to reach the right audience and keep the ones you already have engaged. A general rule of thumb to keep in mind is that you should be posting what your customers or users WANT to see and not what you think they need to see. This may sound like an obvious point, but you would be surprised how many brands miss it when deciding what to post.
As a brand or business trying to make a sale, it’s easy to think you know what about your business or your product your user needs to see. You might be tempted to continuously post about the features of your product that you think the customer needs to know about or repeatedly remind them to buy from you or patronize your business. This is an easy enough way to lose followers on social media or doom your account to a future of slow to zero growth.
Because of the nature of social media, the marketing that is done there should be leisure in nature and primarily to the benefit of the customer. Who is your customer? What do they like? What is their lifestyle? and how can you give them value? They have no reason to follow you on social media except you’re offering them something that they not just appreciate, but either want or need.
What to post
How do you figure out what your customers want to see? You do that by first getting to know your target audience. An easy way to do this is to build something called a customer persona. A customer persona is a semi-fictional depiction of who your ideal customer is—their traits, habits, lifestyle, and behaviors. You can draw assumptions about who your ideal customer is by looking at the kind of people who already patronize your business. how old are they? What do they do for a living? How much do they earn? What are their hobbies, dreams, and aspirations?
Let’s say for the sake of example, your business is a private gym. Your ideal customer would be someone interested in health and fitness but also someone who has enough money to afford a private gym. Let’s build out a customer persona.
Name: Mark
Age: 34
Occupation: Product Manager
Hobbies: Working out, Travelling,
Income: >$50,000
Marital Status: Single
Mapping out your ideal customer like this helps to give a clearer image of who you’re creating content for and what they would like to see from you. In this instance, we’ve gone from —what should we post for people looking for a private gym—to what does—Mark the single 34-year-old product manager who likes traveling—want to see? See how much that narrows it down in your mind’s eye?
If you still have trouble deciding how to match what Mark wants to see with what you as a brand should post to satisfy him, I have a method I use that works for any brand irrespective of what your service or product is. It basically calls for content that satisfies each of the following purposes:
- Motivate: This is essentially feel-good content. But it is a little more than quotes telling your audience that they can be whoever they want to be if they just put their mind to it. Motivational content helps to paint a picture of how your brand or business can help your customer feel better about themselves. For our use case, this could be some workout quotes or evidence of people’s fitness journey, before and after pictures will have the same effect too.
2. Educate: This is any kind of content that brings value to your audience by teaching or informing them about something new. For our use case could be workout plans, meal prep plans, or even uber facts about certain exercises, health, and fitness.
3. Social Proof: Social proof is based on the idea of normative social influence, which states that people will conform in order to be liked by, similar to, or accepted by the influencer (or society). For our use case, this could be images from a time a celebrity or influencer visited your gym or a tweet by a customer saying it’s the best gym they’ve ever been to. It could also be user testimonials, endorsements, or even reposts of images or videos your customers took at the gym. People want what other people want.
4. Entertain: Most content marketing efforts tend to focus on helpful content because people think that because it is what is useful, it will have the most longevity. While this is true, content that entertains is funny, light-hearted, and more likely to be shared between people on social media. For our use case, this could be a meme or some gym and fitness humor that they will come across and want to share with their friends.
5. Convert: While you want to put out content that’s useful to your reader and keeps them entertained, not trying to make a sale at all would be a missed opportunity. I personally recommend 1 piece of content with the intention to convert in every 5 posts. For our use case, this could be an image showing the amazing space management in your gym, its special features, or why it’s better than other gyms. It could also be a promotion for a membership discount or an image showing your in-house juice bar where people can grab a refresher after their workout.
Once you’ve figured out what you want to post, another very important thing to consider is when you want to post and where. It is one thing to have the right content to serve up to your audience but of what use would it be if they never see it?
When to post
Social media channels like Instagram make it easy to figure out when the best time to post with the audience analytics feature that shows you what time of the day your followers are most active. For other channels, you will have to learn by doing. Again, think about your customer persona and what their typical day is like. Perhaps they have a 9–5, publishing your social media posts between 8 and 10 am would be a bad idea as they’re either getting ready for work, just getting settled into work, or just too busy and not looking at their phones. Your very funny meme that could have been better received at 7 pm when they’re unwinding from their day would be completely missed.
Where to Post
Figuring out where to post yet again takes us back to our customer persona. What social media channels are they on? If your ideal customer is a 20-year-old student born in 2000, then you’re not very likely to find them on Facebook and if your Ideal customer is a 56-year-old woman, the chances of you finding them on TikTok are incredibly low.
So listen to your audience and go where they go. What social media channels can you find them on? That’s where you should be.
In conclusion, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to creating a social media strategy for your brand, but once you find what works, it becomes so easy that the entire process goes on autopilot. You will no longer have to think long and hard about what to post as the content will generate itself.
