If you own a business today or are a brand manager in a reputable firm, there is a 100 percent chance that your business is present on social media in one way, shape or form. However, just being present on social media is less than 10 percent of the job done. Remaining active, engaging with users and driving leads through your social media is the rest of the 90 percent.

How many brands that are present on social media today happen to have an active and thriving social media? Not all, we assume. Many brands are just sort of present on social media, without taking conscious steps to actively engage with users and drive traffic.

You cannot expect social media to give you the results you aspire to achieve if you’re just posting random links, mentioning a few folks once or twice a month and calling it a day. Your presence on social media should be a conduit in your brand’s growth and should increase business opportunities.

To add some structure to your social media, you need a social media strategy and some actionable steps to improve your social media presence. And, how do you do that? By utilizing the extra time you have on your hands during the ongoing pandemic and resulting lockdown to full effect. Most managers have been working from home for more than a year now and have extra time due to diminished economic activity. This means that they can take steps to improve their social media presence, strategies and work methods within this period.

In this article we take a look at some exciting social media improvement tips for managers working from home. Following these tips will deliver the results you expect and will drive engagement and revenue.

Benefit from Your Blog

So many businesses today run a blog without properly leveraging its potential for the benefit and success of their business. Blogging is an excellent way to not only complement, but enhance your social media presence. You can leverage the full potential of social media to bring traffic to your website and interact with users on the platform.

Sharing blogs on your social media is also a good way to share and demonstrate your company’s knowledge with others on the platform. This goes to prove the command you have over things and how you can be looked at as a thought leader in your industry.

If you have an active blog that helps out customers in your industry, you should use it as bait to bring traffic to your website. Once you start sharing blog links with interactive captions and titles to your social media, you will witness a significant increase in website traffic and will see more people coming over to visit your website. The increase in website traffic won’t just lead to more ad revenue but will also help open up new sales opportunities. Leads that visit your website through social media will not only help enhance the purpose of your social media presence, but will also offer revenue growth and potential.

Set SMART Goals

Sit down and ask yourself just why you’re on social media in the first place. Not every business has the same objective or requirements from social media.

If you face any confusion or doubts while answering this question directly or saying, ‘because everyone else is on it,’ then you need to go back to the drawing board and formulate a strategy.

As a growing business, you should determine the objectives of every step and look to meet those objectives through the course of your journey. You cannot possibly succeed at what you do if you aren’t setting your pace according to your objectives.

SMART goals come in handy here, just like they have helped tons of businesses for decades. These goals are extremely important for your social media presence and help achieve systematic progress. In short, brands should look to set goals and objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Such objectives are easier to follow and measure and can set the pace for your content strategy. An example of a decent SMART goal or objective would be to ‘increase your Twitter response rate by over 30 percent within the first quarter.’ This objective is based on the SMART acronym and follows all the principles in the way outlined below:

• Specific: The goal is specific because it identifies a set metric in the form of a response rate and identifies a platform in the form of Twitter.
• Measurable: Response rate is a metric that can easily be measured through different dashboards.
• Achievable: The goal set by the business is achievable, because it does not go for an unrealistic objective of 100 percent increase in 10 days.
• Relevant: The goal is relevant to the social media strategy and will help improve social media presence.
• Time Bound: The objective sets a time limit of the first quarter to track progress and measure success.

Assigning a concrete set of objectives to your social media efforts can help you avoid aimless meandering. Social media is full of confused brands with no identified objectives. Set your objectives in line with your requirements and enjoy the fruits of your labor. You can use the free time on your hands during this pandemic to devise a social media strategy for your business, outlining all the important points that you think deserve immediate attention.

Save Time with Photo Editing Tools

Images are extremely necessary for your social media marketing campaign and shouldn’t be compromised at any cost. Articles and social media posts with images tend to get 94 percent more views and traction than articles and posts without images on them.

Most business owners usually shy away from photos because customizing them and preparing them to their own specifications can be a rather arduous task. However, you are in luck because there are a number of interactive social media platforms today that allow you to create pictures of your choice without wasting time or money. Platforms like BeFunky, Canva and Timeline Slicer help you get the best designs and pictures without investing any extra time.

What’s interesting is that you can go and design pictures of your choice on these platforms, without having prior interest in graphic designing. The design process is simple and gives effective results immediately. So, waste no more time and get a hang of these platforms as soon as you can. Once on them, try using the editing function to create stellar graphics free of cost.

Identify Your Audience

Identifying your audience is an important part of social media. If you seriously want to improve your social media presence, it is necessary that you sit down and identify the behavioral patterns of your audience and determine their moods and motives.

Pro-Tip: ‘everyone’ is not your audience

Breaking down your audience will help you identify the sub-groups and demographics you can target on social media. This also allows you to identify the behavior these groups show on social media, and the steps you can take to target them.

Breaking down your audience into sub-groups will help you figure out the following:

• The social media sites you need to be active on
• The posting schedule you should follow for success on social media
• The type of content you should publish for your users to see
• The voice you should portray online for your visitors
• The information you present on your profiles

Many brands keep spinning the wheel without success because they’re unable to identify their audience and post content that speaks to them specifically. It is necessary that you spend some time identifying and studying your audience sub-groups and the behavior that they typically demonstrate. This competitive analysis will give you the desired results sooner or later and will help you increase the traction and engagement levels you achieve online.

Be Human

Ah, this won’t be difficult, right? Most businesses think that being human is something they can easily pull off. Entrepreneurs and social media managers are least concerned about this. In fact, we’re appalled at the limited number of businesses that actually take this seriously.

One of the worst possible mistakes you can make on social media is to come off as a big corporation with bots handling your social media and without any personality. In this modern age of bots and transparency, people want to be able to interact with you and appreciate if they can get to know your business on a more personal level.

Brands that do realize this talk to their followers as they would do with their friends and crack jokes with them. Social media followers today expect you to converse with them and understand their behavior. Additionally, they want their negative reviews and feedback to be addressed by humans in a humane manner. Don’t have bots responding to customers, because as responsive as they might be, they kill the purpose of communication on social media.

Showing off the human side of your brand should identifiably also mean showing off the faces present on your social feeds. Be it office photos, social media snippets or PR photos, make sure that you identify and show people that run your social media page. Let customers you interact with on your social media know who’s running the show.

Seek Relationships and Not Just Followers

This is a never-ending debate in social media marketing circles. Should you seek inactive followers or active relationships? What sounds prettier – 10,000 followers that ignore you or 1,000 followers that converse with you regularly and can turn into potential customers?

Do not leave the social out of your social media strategy and blindly build your followers list. The more you interact with your social media followers, the more you’ll be able to build a good fan base of people that actually enjoy following you.

If you’re not sure where you can start building relationships with your followers, learn the following skills and ideas:

• Always tag and mention people when you’re replying in comments
• Answer the questions people ask and do not come from a position of power but be social
• Reply when people share the content you post or mention you
• Start conversations where you can, don’t shy away from them

Focus on Strategizing Over Selling

While social selling is indefinitely rising around us, brands should focus on social media strategizing and helping than on just hard selling. While it does make sense to push your offers and deals to your social media followers if you are in ecommerce, it is necessary that you answer questions and help customers when and where you can. Do not forget the importance of using social media as a tool to help followers and fans rather than just selling products to them.

Create a Content Calendar

Working from home currently? Do you have some spare time on your hands? Well, utilize that time to create a content calendar for your business. The calendar should create a detailed outlook on the social media posts you should make during a period and the frequency they should follow. The nature and frequency of the posts will eventually get you the engagement levels you require and will help you interact more with customers.

You can plan promotional campaigns through this calendar and then follow the results to signal improvements within it or keep following it for the future.

There are numerous ways to improve your social media presence. With the relative period of inactivity during the current pandemic, you can utilize the time off to revamp your social presence and increase engagement levels. Follow the tips in this article for effective progress and results.