One of the greatest assets a brand can have is an engaged and loyal audience. Building solid relationships with your customers is paramount to the growth of your business. Social media allows you to directly connect with your target market and strengthen your relationship with them.

According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers said that social media marketing was important for their businesses. Consequently, 80% of this group reported that their efforts lead to traffic increase on their websites. Unfortunately, about 85% of marketers are unaware of the best way to leverage social media.

Thus, you can miss the opportunity to be closer with your customers, showcase your brand, and nurture relationships. On the flipside, when social media is maximized, it can boost sales, brand awareness, and customer engagement. Let’s take a look at some best practices.

1.       Set measurable and realistic goals

Like a building needs blueprints before construction, social media marketing needs planning. Many marketers fail as their resources are insufficient to back up their plans.  Before anything else, remember to evaluate your team’s capacity.  How many posts can your writers churn out per week? Can you afford to create the output you want without compromising quality? Do you have the manpower to fulfil your plans? These can help you determine how much and how frequent you can publish.

2.       Be consistent across all platforms

There is nothing that confuses customers more than multiple brand accounts and not knowing which the official page is. Your brand’s online presence must be uniform across all social media platforms. Make it easy for customers to recognize you by being consistent with your logo, tagline, imagery, description, language, and brand identity on all your official accounts.

3.       Interact with your audience

Social media allows businesses to personally engage with their customers. Whether it is through comments or messages, it gives you a direct connection to interact with them. A report published by Texas Tech University revealed that brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. Interacting with your customers by responding to comments and messages. Build a community that your market will be happy to be a part of.

4.       Be human

Essentially, social media is about relationships. Humanize your brand and make it relatable as much as possible to build real connections with your customers. When engaging with them, remember to be proactive rather than be reactive. Aim to be funny, creative, witty, compassionate, and emphatic and your customers would feel encouraged to interact with you!

5.       Keep up with trends

Social media allows you to learn what your customers want to see from your brand. It gives you an opportunity to gain valuable data about their interests and how they behave. Social listening and building your strategies around the interests of your customers is a great way to start improving your business. Stay in the loop by integrating trends into your content marketing plans.

6.       Monitor your social media analytics

Measuring social media engagement and content performance is a vital part of social media marketing. This can help you determine what type of content works, what needs more work, and what does not work at all. Analyzing your social media analytics can give you the information you need to meet your objectives. Programs like Google Analytics and SimilarWeb [link please] gives you an overall analysis of your site’s performance. You can also use the native analytics of each social media platform.

7.       Be patient

Nothing happens overnight. The great thing about social media is that it puts your brand on the same playing field as the bigger businesses. It can take time to build a loyal following which is why constant communication with your target market is important. “Interacting with your customers regularly is a show of good faith for other customers,” Jayson DeMers, author of “The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online,” said. You need to gain the trust of your customers and nurture your relationship with them. These things take time.

At its core, social media is a communication channel. It is a tool that businesses can leverage to publicly showcase and enrich customer relationships. Having active social media accounts can encourage customer loyalty and receptiveness. When done right, social media marketing can help boost customer engagement, awareness, and conversions. By connecting with them in this platform, you become less like a corporation and more like a group of people with a shared vision.

Are you having a hard time managing your social media accounts? Leave a comment below or try our free five-hour trial!

Discover how you can leverage social media with our Social Media Series!

• Simple Tips to Creating Engaging Social Media Content
• Talk About Timing: The Best Times to Post on Social Media
• Social Media Best Practices to Boost Customer Engagement

Pepper Virtual Assistants is a business solutions firm that specializes on virtual administrative and personal assistance, online marketing, customer support, and copywriting. We are known for reliability through our managed services, responsive client handling backed by extensive training, and rockstar virtual assistants hired for their skills and expertise.