Without social media, today’s world would be a very different place. It showed us a new realm of possibilities, and in exchange, we have changed what we want, need, and expect from it, whether it’s our business or brand, such as JustStart.
Why should you care? Social media’s impact on the world changed the business environment forever, presenting unparalleled opportunities and permanently shifting customer expectations.
It’s not a question of whether you need to use social media in business if you prefer to remain profitable. What you need to know is how to keep up with changes in social media strategy and use these dynamic, constantly evolving platforms to maximize your brand, influence, and credibility.
Let’s take a look at the steps you need to cover to make your brand bigger and more powerful than before.
- Make a list of all the ways your business currently uses social media.
- Take 10 minutes a day to browse new social media sites that look useful and get familiar with how they work.
- Sort your ideas by the target audience you want to reach. Make notes on whether the new sites you are discovering increase your branding, influence, and credibility.
1. Create a Social Media Plan and Platform
In order to successfully showcase your brand on social media, you will need both a plan and a platform.
Your plan is your strategy, laying out a roadmap that helps you determine what you want to achieve and to measure your actions and goals.
Your platform is the foundation from which you build your online credibility. It’s the cumulative impact of all of your content and social media interactions that support your brand and extend your influence.
So, what comes first, the plan or the platform? Usually, it’s a little of both evolving together. For someone just starting, creating a plan and platform simultaneously will likely keep you from heading down dead ends.
2. Making it Happen
What do you want from social media? If you are like most people, you have several results in mind. The most common might include:-
- Gather prospective customers
- Engage with the current customers
- Raise your visibility as an expert
- Draw the attention of the media and influencers
- Get people to sign up for your website, events, or to buy your product
- Demonstrate your influence by growing the number of people who like and follow your pages
All of these are valid expectations from your social media investment. Many people will achieve most of these goals within a certain period. But as you began, it is important to prioritize your goals because it’s easier to add one goal once the other is achieved than to pursue them all at the same time.
Your Main Goals to Increase Your Brand Value Could be the Following:-
- Identify your ideal audience and make a strategic social media plan to map out how to find and gather prospective customers.
- Develop useful and interesting content to engage with the customers.
- Plan your time and be present on social media, and be consistently visible.
- Like, share, and comment on good content from other pages. Follow other bloggers, influencers, or famous people in your niche and learn from what they do to grab the attention of the people.
- Engage with your customers through stories by adding questions and polls.
These goals will not only help you find new customers but will also help you build a strong connection with them.
3. Building Credibility
Before people buy from you, they need to know and trust you. Social media is a great way to reach individuals around the world in ways to get known, be liked, or gain trust. You need to plan various strategies and actions designed to gather your audience or potential customers and build your credibility.
You need to use interpersonal skills on social media to go a long way. For this, ask questions that draw people out and encourage them to talk about their needs, concerns, and desires. The most important thing is to be a good listener. Don’t lead with a sales pitch or be quick to ask for business.
Give first, whether it’s a tip or a recommendation of a resource. Answer questions or suggest service providers, and share useful content like links to articles and blog posts. Shift your social media in the direction of your qualifying questions, so that you continue to engage with the people who are truly interested in buying your product.
Let people experience your credibility and help them to like, know or trust you. When they are ready, they will follow you or send you a message, waiting to connect with you.
4. Use the Power of Stories
One of the best ways to engage with your customers is by sharing stories. People like stories, and they feel more connected when the story is emotional and inspiring. Stories are powerful as they can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors. They define you and your unique approach to the services you provide to them.
After reading or listening to a story, people will feel connected to it as they will find similarities between their journey and theirs. Use these stories to tell the special things about your brand, and your audience will find you.
Case studies, videos, and after stories are all kinds of stories you can narrate to your customers. The best stories don’t just share the outcome or the result; they also describe the journey, setbacks, obstacles, and mistakes that led them so far. When you show vulnerability, it helps other people relate their own stories to you. A good story not only satisfies the reader but also describes what success emotionally means to each one of them. You can take the following steps to tell your stories:-
- Think about the clients you have achieved great outcomes with and make a list of potential stories that you could tell.
- Keep the budget challenge in mind as you create these stories. Make the outcome of your services or product too good to pass up.
- As you think about your satisfied clients, also make a list of people who would be ideal for your stories and approach them nicely.
5. The Mighty Three
There are a dozen social media sites that exist, but it always comes down to three: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They are the three main sites that have a large and diverse following. These three sites may be different from each other, but each set is a tool to accomplish a similar goal through various styles of conversation and engagement.
Facebook is meant to be a conversation place and not a broadcast, so it is a great place to attract and engage with your clients in a way that leverages your credibility and reinforces your brand. This is a great opportunity to be creative and mix things up by sharing photos, text, and videos. You can also promote or boost your post through Facebook Ads Manager.
Twitter is a great place for sharing quotes, one-liners, and observations about trends, topics, and new events. It’s perfect for sharing a link for an interesting article, your latest blog post or video. Share a survey or poll link, and discuss the results with your audience. You can also live-tweet about the highlights of a presentation or a big project that you are working on.
The news tweet on Twitter moves faster than the wall of Facebook. So, you can post once an hour on Twitter, as it varies on every social media platform. Sharing quality content by people you admire helps your audience establish you as a giver and makes you win points with the people who are forwarding it. Your sources will return the favour by forwarding helpful content that you have created, which will increase your visibility too.
Hashtags are another way to enhance the visibility of your posts. You can also watch the trending column for popular hashtags and use those to relate to your content.
LinkedIn is a little different from Twitter and Facebook as it is a platform to showcase your professional skills and ability to spread awareness. You can create great visuals and post them to make a good impression on your customers. For your brand value to increase more, you should get your employees and partners on board too. Another great way is to participate in other groups and update frequently.
6. The Instagram Game
We all know that Instagram is an incredibly visually based platform, which is why having a good brand is so important if you want to see growth. But a brand is so much more than just a pretty grid; it’s about your voice, your message, and the audience that you are speaking to.
You can post all of the beautifully designed graphics in the world, but if you don’t have a true brand backing it up, like the way you connect with your audience or the personality of your brand, you will not see any growth. But on the other hand, if you know how to represent better but don’t have good graphics or profile, it’s still gonna be a problem for you.
If you are starting from the start or are already at a certain place, it’s still important to build a more powerful and trustworthy brand. For this, you should ask these questions first:-
- Who do you wanna serve?
- What do you do for them?
- Who are you as a brand?
- How do you communicate?
- How do you represent yourself?
You can try different strategies to engage, like telling your audience to create content for you, like sharing pictures of your product and sharing it to get the attention of the customers.
You can also run contests, collaborate with different people or a community, ask them questions that they find interesting, etc.
7. 3×3 Method
It is basically a method where you take the 3 values that are important to you and 3 content pillars. You may release a video, or you do anything in your business that revolves back to the three values that you have and the pillars and revolve your business around that.
For example, the three values that I have for my business are high value. So every content that I produce and everything that I ever do, whether it is free or paid it’s a value of mine to make sure that it’s always of high value.
The second one is transparency. So what I always value is making sure that every step of the way, no matter how big my audience gets or how much money I make, I am always going to be transparent with my audience.
The third value is energy. I always want to make sure that I maintain high energy and that I convey it on my social media platforms.
Because these values are important to me, I try to ingrain them in everything that I do within my business. Once you have identified these values, the next step is to look into the pillars. These should be the three content pillars that you want to be consistent in within your personal brand. It can be anything like social media, coaching, entrepreneurship, etc.
When you combine these, you now have a reminder for yourself of what you need to be consistent in. This will boost your consistency. As you build your online presence, don’t overlook the value of using dedicated platforms like Puffer to streamline content creation, brand storytelling, and multi-platform consistency—all while staying true to your values and goals.
Let me know if you have more tips in the comment section, also connect with us.
