Should I be using Social Media?

So your brand spanking new website has just gone live and is set up to convert… but you’re not quite getting the traffic to it that you thought you might. What can you do?

Well you have a few options available for driving traffic to your site and one of the most popular is social media.

Love it or hate it, social media has been around now for 20+ years and doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon and when it comes to your business… this is a very good thing.   

We’ve invited our friends from Social Media Marketing Agency, Erudite Digital to share their tips on how to maximise your success on social media and drive more traffic to your website...

Social media is so much more than selfies, weird dance routines and pictures of avocado on toast, and if you own a business, it’s somewhere you need to be. 

According to Hootsuite, there are more than 4.2 BILLION active social media users (yes, with a ‘B’!). Those 4.2 billion users spend an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media every day. That 2 hours and 25 minutes offers you and your business an incredible opportunity- you can increase brand awareness, humanise your brand, generate leads, boost sales, engage with customers and direct traffic to your brand spanking new website. 

So here are 5 tips on how to get started on social media and maximise your chances of success:

1. Set Goals and Objectives

Before you get started, set some goals and objectives. Why is it that you’re on social media, what platform are your audience on and what are you trying to achieve? When you look back in a months time, 6 months time, or a years time, how are you going to measure your success? 

Pick a main objective, eg drive traffic to your website, choose your platform (better to be on one or two and do them well, than be on all of them poorly) and then add some numbers to it - 100 users per day/week/month. 

From here you can break it down into small realistic actions to help you achieve this objective. It might be to write a blog a week and share it on your socials, document things happening in the business, or to spend an hour a week engaging with your followers, hanging out where they hang out, answering questions or just being honest. 

2. Plan Ahead

Planning ahead on social media means that you consistently have content going out. This doesn’t mean you have to be on your phone all the time.  

The best way to plan ahead is by creating a content calendar. Using the goals and objectives that you have set, you can plan out a month’s worth of content at a time.

Split what you do in your business up into 3 or 4 main content areas… maybe:

1. Educate and Add Value
2. Explain Your Services
3. What are your unique selling points

You want your content to be fun, creative and unique to your business - social media is all about showing up consistently without pushing a hard sell.

3. Use Scheduling Apps

You’ve created your content, but you don’t want to have to go on to each platform and manually post every day. That’s time consuming and stressful, and defeats the purpose of having a content calendar. This is where scheduling apps become your best friend. As the name suggests, scheduling apps allow you to schedule content to go live ahead of time. It means you can schedule content to be posted at optimum times and on all platforms while you can focus on the other elements of your business that need your attention. There are plenty of scheduling apps out there such as Publr, HootSuite, Sprout Social. Many offer some free level of service while others charge a reasonable monthly fee. Do your research and find out which one is best for you and the platforms you use!

4. Consistency is Key 

It’s important that your social media strategy is consistent throughout, and aligns with what’s on your website. First up, your tone of voice. You’ll decide this based on your audience and your business. Perhaps you’re an insurance broker and you’re targeting an older audience. You’ll want your tone of voice to be friendly, trustworthy and professional. However, maybe you own a dog food company and you can incorporate a bit of humour throughout, (and the occasional doggy TikTok video) 

The same goes for aesthetics. The colours you use and the fonts you decide on should be consistent so that your brand is recognisable. Canva is a great tool for creating content and allows you to create a brand palette with your chosen colours and fonts. Last but certainly not least, there must be consistency in how often you post. Post regularly, say 3-5 times a week, every week. It creates a level of trust, you don’t know when someone is looking for exactly what you’re offering.

5. Review it Regularly 

Reviewing your social media content regularly will allow you to know whether or not you are hitting your goals, and how to improve moving forward. Each social media platform will have a unique set of insights that allows you to identify what demographics you are reaching, what your engagement rate is and what’s the best time to post. You can see what kind of content is doing well, and what kind of content isn’t. Like anything else, social media is test and measure, it doesn’t get easier the more you do it, you get better!

These 5 steps should help you get off to a good start on social media. For us, the golden rule is consistency is more important than perfection. What you post doesn’t have to be perfect. Something is nearly always better than nothing! 

Finally, there are so many tools and resources out there to help you- from task managers, to scheduling apps, to design templates, as well as digital marketing agencies. For many business, they are happy to invest the time and effort to do their social media in-house and for others, outsourcing it is the best use of their time and money - find out what works best for you and if you have any questions - give us a shout and we’ll point you in the right direction.

A huge thank you to the guys at Erudite for these 5 tips on how to take your social media to the next level and to get more traffic to your website. If this is something you’re interested in doing but don’t have the know-how, time or skill set, let us know and we’ll happily make introductions to the Erudite team.