If you are a business owner or content creator and thinking that using the same strategies of last year are going to work in 2023 for your social media strategy, you are wrong! The industry is changing, ad costs are rising and more and more. Entrepreneurs are realizing the importance of building an organic audience.
The problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to do this which is why we’re going to show you how.
What are the 5 C’s of social media?
Starting a company social media account from scratch is a daunting process. It can feel impossible to reach the number of followers you want or match what your competitors already have. Try following the 5 C’s of social media to easily build your online presence.
- Community
- Contribution
- Conversation
- Connection and
- Collaboration
Community refers to the ability you have to engage with prospects in their online hang outs like Twitter chats and LinkedIn groups. Knowing where your target audience spends your time will help you connect with them by participating in these groups which brings you to contribute.
Be sure to create original content in the form of blogs, ebooks and videos that highlight your product or services. Then use that content, publish it to the appropriate community and start engaging.
Also, as our next C, conversation. Don’t just be a bystander start a conversation with your prospects. Sharing your targeted content and responding to your followers will help you connect with the right people in your industry. Speaking of connecting, connection is vitally important to having a successful social media account. Encouraging people to like your page doesn’t have to be annoying or spammy.
Lastly, collaborate with your consumers and influencers on projects. Starting a Twitter poll is a good way to ask customers what they want to see in your next product while also appearing transparent and trustworthy.
Start following the 5 C’s of social media and you’ll be on your way to a much more effective online presence.
Creative ways to promote your business on social media
It may sound cliche but the first thing you really need to do is guarantee who your target audience actually is?
How to find your target audience?
Understanding your ideal customer avatar is vital to the success of your small business.
Let’s say, your business sells essential oils. Where do you start? First, you need to understand what type of content they consume?
You can start to do by looking into your competitors: What they’re posting and what their customers are responding well to? However your competitors aren’t just people that are selling the exact same products or services as you.
What you should do is go over to every major search engine and search for your product or service to get inspiration about what your ideal customer is actually searching for.
Let’s say, you’re looking at how to cook with essential oils. You’ve a whole bunch of websites and videos that you can take for inspiration. You can go ahead and replicate this content through searching engines. You can start a Youtube channel putting out a bunch of information about boxing equipment, how to store and clean it or how to look after it. It’s an effective strategy.
Keyword Search Tools
Another thing is that you can use websites like Answer the Public which is a keyword search tool which allows us to research different keywords. It is going to throw up all the relevant searches and the most searched key terms in your industry.
Instagram Marketing for Your Social Media Strategy
Instagram is a great platform to use when you are researching your audience and coming up with a new social media strategy.
If you only sell essential oils in the USA, you can get some US based inspiration. You just need to go to search and type in essential oil US and click on listing hashtags. After that, you can see the most viewed content for essential oils in the US coming up.
You can get inspiration, have a look at what people are engaging with and what people are liking. Replicate this content for your own page if it’s relevant for you. You just get into this vortex of your competitors and your customers.
Those might sound a little bit overwhelming here. However, there are many ways that you can gain inspiration about the kind of content you want to put out there.
How to promote your business on social media for free
Video is one of the best ways to sell services or products. If you feel comfortable enough to record video, we would advise you starting off on a platform like Youtube or Tiktok or both. If you usually produce Youtube content, you can take the time to create micro content on Tiktok.
The Tiktok organic algorithm works like the paid algorithm with Facebook ads these days. If you have a company, product or service that includes a product which is visual and you can explain it in different ways, you can engage with an audience via video, start off with Tiktok and Youtube as well.
However, you need to remain consistent on those kinds of platforms. Many people give up after a few weeks of creating content on video-based platforms, saying they don’t have enough time. Unfortunately that’s just a poor excuse but a lot of business owners fail because they fall into the trap of the fact that they should be creating content on every single platform.
What we would advise you doing is following the “80-20 Rule“. Spend 80 percent of your time on one base platform that you’ve chosen. For example; Youtube or Tiktok. Then spend 20% of your time just showing up on other platforms.
You of course can maximize on everything in the future when you’ve a big team or lots of resources but initially just focus 80% of your time on one thing now.
Building a Community
Another part of any successful social media strategy is community building. If you’re going to build a community around your business, products or your services, we first need to figure out what platform you actually want to spend the majority of your time on.
You can then consider how you can build a community around that platform, a community of people that love your content and are thankful for the value that you put out for them.
That’s the key word here: “Value“.
You want to be putting out valuable content surrounding your product or service and become the known authority and expert within your industry.
When you start creating valuable content that your customers can benefit from and learn from and you can build a community around this content. That is when you will elevate yourself above everybody else regardless of your products you will be seen as the authority within your industry and you will have the respect of all of the customers within it.
Create A Content Calendar for Social Media
You should create a content calendar that encompasses the channels you want to focus on, and the content types that work best for each one of them.
Now that you already know who your target audience is, what makes them tick, and the type of content works best for each channel is time to start using that knowledge to come up with the schedule.
You’ll want to use a tool like Hootsuite or Post Planner to organize your efforts to ensure that you’re on track to move forward as quickly as possible so you get the results you’re looking for.
3 Bonus tips to implement in your strategy to skyrocket your following
1- Study your analytics
If a video performs well, study it, be a learner, figure out why. Why did it perform well? If a video totally flopped, study and learn from it. It’s not the winning, losing or failing and succeeding. It’s just about learning and experimenting.
2- Don’t do engagement groups
It’s going to waste your time, confuse the algorithm and hold you back from seeing growth. Engagement groups do not help with your growth, authentic growth or long-term growth.
3- Be aware of what is working in your specific niche
You will discover this when you do your own research. What sort of content works well in your niche? Don’t put pressure on yourself to have to reinvent the wheel within the first 30 days of posting. Doing what you see is already working well because that is how you will see the quickest result and then over time you will learn how to reinvent the wheel your own way.
Conclusion
You can finally get more sales with this ecommerce content marketing by creating great posts. Tag your products in posts and stories by using integrations to scale your business across Facebook, Instagram, and more.
Start selling on social media today!
