There are more than 4.2 billion social media users. This number grows every day. As more and more digital natives are born and as internet access comes to more and more remote areas, it’s probably safe to say that you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who’s not on social media within a generation.
Sure, there will always be the outliers, the people who are adamant about not being on social media. But if you’ve ever taken a beginner’s statistics course you know that outliers eventually regress to the mean.
I won’t bore you with linear regression equations — partly because I don’t remember them and partly because this is not the point I’m trying to make. This small detour was just to say that you can’t afford to ignore social media because almost no one does.
And the first rule of any decent marketing strategy is to be where your customers are. You’re probably already on social media. But are you constantly delivering the high-quality content your followers expect you to?
If your answer is no or not sure, keep reading.
43% of consumers always make a point out of researching a brick-and-mortar business before they visit it. 48% only do so occasionally. You’ve got a grand total of 92% of consumers who take to the internet to find more about a business before they bother with a trip.
Social media profiles are the first ones to pop on an online search. For SMEs who don’t invest too much in SEO or don’t update their websites frequently, this happens more often than for large corporations.
So what happens when a user stumbles upon your social media profiles? Are they going to be enticed to visit your business (online or offline) or will they find an unappealing desert?
GIF via Tenor
Oftentimes, the social media accounts of SMEs look like this because SME owners and marketers took the quality lesson to heart: if you’ve got nothing interesting to say, don’t say anything.
That’s still a great, valid lesson. However, it doesn’t mean that you should stop posting until you’ve got a major announcement to make. If you find it all confusing, seek assistance from a technical SEO agency that will provide personalized answers based on your history of online activities.
You can come up with great content and you can do it consistently even without a huge social media team. Here’s where to get started:
You probably have data galore. But it’s hard to make sense of it, especially if it’s on various platforms and formats. The number one place to go: your social media accounts:
If your social media profiles aren’t exactly followed by millions of people, you may find it hard to get actionable insights from the data mentioned above. Plus, you will eventually run out of social-media-powered insights for social media. It’s a bit circular and it will get old very fast.
Luckily, you’ve got other sources of data that never get old:
Your CRM, your ERP, your email marketing solution, and pretty much every other solution you use are brimming with customer data. You already know that you can dig deep into them to get sales and marketing insights. But what about insights for social media content?
Yes, you’ve got those too.
Take one of our subscribers whose product seems to benefit everyone. Typing Master’s solution promises to teach you to type faster.
GIF via GIPHY
Since it’s hard to pinpoint who doesn’t want to type faster, our subscribers had to narrow down their leads significantly to find those people who both want to type faster AND are willing to pay for something to help them.
By using our ActiveCampaign for Zoho CRM integration, they managed to zero in on their ideal customer. The combined insights from the two platforms helped them craft better messages for all their campaigns.
This is just one of the examples we see every day with our subscribers. By combining the data from their mission-critical solutions into a single dashboard, they are able to find new angles of communication.
And they can use those angles on every platform they are on, including social media. For instance, if your Mailchimp for Salesforce integration revealed that it’s mostly women in their 30s who are willing to buy your product, you could easily craft social media messages that appeal to that target demographic.
Platforms like Google Trends or Answer the Public can tell you what people are interested in right now. The recipe is seemingly simple: find a trend or a piece of news, add some of your brand flavors to it and hit publish.
See how I mentioned it was seemingly simple?
There are a few caveats. First off, stay away from divisive and controversial trends, like politics, for example. You don’t want to bet on the wrong horse here, even if the horse you’re picking seems to make more sense.
Speaking of trends, one of the current ones is big brands going partisan. However, this can backfire spectacularly, and, remember, you don’t have the resources to fight a social media war.
So, unless you have a real stake in an election, stay out of it.
The next caveat is choosing trends and pieces of news that matter to your audience. Dow Jones recently fell by more than 500 points. It’s a significant piece of news and it may be part of a bigger trend.
But does it matter to my audience?
If I’m eToro, yes, it absolutely does. It’s high time I had a point of view of my own on it.
If I sell pet food, probably not. Unless, of course, my clients are all Wall Street moguls.
You see, there are countless niches within every niche. At a glance, I’d be tempted to say you should leave economic analyses to The Wall Street Journal if you own a pet store.
On the other hand, if your client base is actually made of people who work on Wall Street, you can absolutely use this trend. Here’s an example:
Did the recent fall of Dow Jones affect your portfolio? We’ll walk your dog while you’re using the extra time to figure out how to bounce back.
This kind of cross-referencing is what makes social media content great.
It doesn’t have to be all business on your social media accounts. In fact, while it’s true that most people use social media to “keep up” with things, keeping up doesn’t always mean serious news and business opportunities. It can also mean the latest meme trend.
Image via Hootsuite
Finding fun or entertaining content is surprisingly high on this list. I’m not saying you should turn your social media feeds into a collection of memes (please don’t do that!).
But the occasional (tasteful!) meme can go a long way. So can other things like:
Pretty much everything you say on social media will sound and feel like advertising. You may share an informative blog post, but people will know that you are just adding them to a sales funnel as soon as they use that link to subscribe to your posts.
This isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it’s what makes the business world go round. People know you’re trying to sell them something and they’ll stick around for as long as they are interested in your product or your content.
There is, however, a way to have your cake and eat it too. It’s called user-generated content.
User-generated content is what your customers say about you. It can be a review on a third-party website, a social media comment, a video testimonial, a public conversation where your brand was mentioned, and so on.
This is without a doubt the most powerful type of content you can use on social media.
Why?
Because it’s in their words.
No matter how hard you try to adjust your voice to match that of your audience it will still feel a bit off. When the words come from actual people like them, it’s a whole different story.
It’s the most effective piece of advertising and the best type of content to publish everywhere.
If you don’t have enough to go on, find out how to collect user-generated content via email [we’ve also added templates to make it easier for you!].
When you’re not sure what to post on social media, remember that inspiration is always out there. But most of all, it’s in there — in your marketing and sales solutions that have tons of data on what your customers are interested in and why.
With a powerful integration solution like SyncApps, you don’t even have to dig it up. It’s right there in your dashboard, so you can leverage it any time on any platform, social media or not.
