7 Ways to Build A Strong Online Social Media Presence

Almost 4.66 billion people were active internet users as of October 2020, encompassing 59 percent of the global population.

This shows that more people are engaging with social media every day and if you own a business and are not inclined to establish a strong online presence on social media, there is a chance your customers already are or soon will be choosing your competitors instead of your business.

The challenge most businesses face when it comes to social media is not whether or not to make use of it but how to make use of it.

A lot of businesses are out there on social media, advertising their products and services and at the end of it all, they still don’t achieve the goal they set for their businesses simply because they are not using the platforms right.

Therefore, in this blog post, I would discuss with you how you can leverage social media to establish brand awareness, increase traffic, and above all, increase conversion rate.

1. Set Your Goals and Objectives for Your Social Media Presence

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The first thing you need to do as a business that wants to maintain and increase its online presence on social media is to clearly define your goals and objectives.

Clearly spell out what you want to achieve with each social media platform.

Being active on social media has a number of benefits for business, and there are many things that can be accomplished with your online social presence.

This can be activities such as performing customer service,  generating leads, increasing your audience, driving sales, generating and increasing web traffic, gaining valuable insights and feedback.

To achieve some of the above measures of success, you must have a goal in mind that you can work toward. because you’ll need to create a strategy to get there.

Having a goal would enable you to measure accurately your success rate and how far you are in achieving those goals.

For example, if your business goal is to increase brand awareness and you want to have 5000 likes or comments in 6 months you would work on traffic generation, likes, and comment on your social media platform and if at the end of the 6 months you have 8000 likes, then you can say you have achieved that goal.

2. Choose the Right Social Media Platform

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After you must have known what your goal is, the next thing is to choose the right platform to help you achieve those goals.

The fact is that you don’t have to be on every platform before you can have a successful online presence on social media.

What you need is the best platform that your audience is most active on that can help achieve your social media goals.

You can make use of a customer persona or avatar to determine your audience.

A customer avatar is just a sketch of who your audience is based on their demographics like age, interest or occupation, etc.

There are different social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. The most popular ones are Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram because of the number of active users they have.

Facebook is popular because of its user base and its advanced advertising option.

YouTube is next because of its user statistics of over 1 billion active subscribers and video content which is the most engaging content as far as 2021 is concerned.

Last is Instagram which is owned by Facebook and popular because of its video and image content which is considered the best form of content.

3. Create Valuable Content

The phrase “content is king” is still relevant and would continue to be in the world of digital marketing and social media.

Valuable content, ranging from videos, images, text, to blog posts and infographics can contribute to the online presence of the website and the business that publishes them.

Content marketing is an excellent way of introducing your brand and creating a unique personality for your business.

Therefore creating relevant, engaging, and informative content that reflects your brand’s value is a top priority for your business to remain relevant on social media.

Note that Google always ranks a better website with high-quality content by showing them on the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

This can enhance your online presence on social media, increase your brand growth and traffic, and attract more sales.

4. Make Use of the Right Tool

In order to manage your social media platform effectively, you have to take advantage of tools that would make your work easier.

There are many tools to help increase your productivity online.

This means you can use social media for your business without having a full-scale social media team.

One of the social media tools is Hootsuite or Buffer which can help you centralize all mentions and messages directed at your company or business in one dashboard.

It enables you to respond to and engage without having to log in to each of your individual social media accounts.

Another great tool is analytics which can help you summarize activities going on on your website and social media page to give a better picture of your overall social efforts.

Brandwatch gives you an in-depth report on your social activities while  Hootsuite Insights provides an overview of what your customers are doing, feeling, and thinking when it comes to your brand.

5. Make Use of Hashtags

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Hashtags are used to bring together similar content together to help grow your social media presence.

Whenever you post something on your social media accounts, try to make use of hashtags.

Hashtags are essential in building your online presence, especially on Twitter and Instagram because Hashtags make your post show up on the content page of that Hashtag which automatically exposes it to a much larger audience.

These can help bring people to your social media accounts and subsequently to your website.

However, make sure that you don’t overuse hashtags and load your posts with them because it can make your post look spammy and may harm your social media presence if you aren’t careful.

6. Make Use of the Social Media Story

Everybody loves a good story. Nigeria has a popular story – “tales by moonlight” or “Alo”.

Naturally, people are always happy when they hear a story, it is refreshing, emotional, educative, and entertaining at the same time.

Stories provoke people’s emotion and often compel them to make decisions.

If you want your brand to stand the test of time, you need to be telling your brand’s story across different social media platforms to differentiate yourself from competitors.

Make use of stories to build deep connections and trust with customers and earn your customer’s trust and loyalty.

7. Track Your Performance

As you implement your social media strategy, it’s essential for you to keep track of what works and what does not.

This makes you know what is working and how you can improve them and what is not working so you can stop doing it or find a way to make them work.

Analytics tools like Google, Buffer, and Hootsuite can give you a great picture of your social efforts and can help track whichever metrics matter most to your business.

Once you have an idea of how your strategy is working, you can make small changes to boost your online success by making use of A/B testing.

No matter the size of your business, having your business on social media can improve your business tremendously if you make use of it well.

The point is to take it slow. You don’t need to do it all at once, set your goals, and start with two or three social media platforms and build your social media presence over time.

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