Twitter. LinkedIn. Facebook. Google+. Instagram. SnapChat. The list goes on, but what are the best social media platforms to use to drive brand awareness and consumer engagement? We have broken down some strategies for you.
1. The Rule of 10-4-1: Most B2B companies are going to want to follow this best practice. It is the strategy that for every month you post 10 industry related articles, blogs, topics that are directly targeted to educate the consumer and help them in their decision making process. You should additionally offer 4 content offers per month (or 1 per week). These are e-books, white papers, PDFs and other helpful items that people will find value in downloading to gain more information and self educate. Lastly, there should be 1 time per month that a company can self-promote. Maybe it's a recent award recognition, maybe a new service or product. By following the 10-4-1 strategy you should see a steady increase in thought leadership as well as brand interest and loyalty.
2. Customer Focused Social Strategy: No one likes waiting on hold, let alone when you are having trouble, or need help. Social platforms have become a great place for companies to quickly field and service clients in need. This takes monitoring, but when done can be highly effective and lead to happy customers who do the promoting for you.
3. Track and Talk Social Strategy: In order to know what's working you have to set up a baseline of engagement methods. You can use tools like Google Analytics, hootsuite, HubSpot and others to track social post engagement. These should be stats that get reviewed in monthly meetings and content and postings should be adjusted according to what the data shows. Do this a few times, and see the positive impact it begins to make in your lead quality.
The biggest thing to remember is no matter what social media marketing strategy you go with, sticking to it will determine how successful you are. The more you show the world you are a thought leader, the more search engines and other websites will show you love back, thus increasing your overall reach and campaign effectiveness. Need help with implementing a social strategy? CLICK HERE