Time Tested Ways to Increase Your Business Social Media Presence

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I remember during the 90s when gas cost less than two bucks a gallon. Boy bands were all the rage, the video game industry was just starting to get its legs under it, and MTV was still a thing. Back then, the internet was just some newfangled thing that cost too much and provided too little compared to good ol’ television. TV, radio, and print ads were the undisputed kings of marketing and advertising.

Now, however, the internet is ubiquitous, and many of its users are on social media platforms. There are about 4.9 billion social media users in 2023 — more than half of the global population. Social media platforms present a marketing opportunity the likes of which the world has never seen before. So let’s talk about how you can increase your social media presence and reap the benefits.

Why social media?

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Sites and apps like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok are so common in today’s internet-bound culture that some business owners forget that they offer a plethora of services that can be used to increase sales. Imagine knowing where your ads are doing well, which demographic favors your product or service, and how many people are engaging with your content — all with a press of a button.

Businesses are encouraged to utilize social media platforms to their fullest potential, ensuring the best possible numbers and conversions for their offerings. But it’s not as easy as posting an out-of-touch meme on your page and hoping that will turn viewers into customers. You need to consider increasing your social media presence as an investment if you want your business to profit from these platforms.

Create valuable and engaging content

Note: Participating in screenplay competitions can also provide unique content ideas and engaging stories to share on your social media platforms.

Let’s start things off with some heavy emphasis. The entire point of creating social media content from a business standpoint is to entice users and potential customers to take action or “engage with” your posts. And in order to engage users, your content must provide value while being interesting or entertaining to some degree (you can use social media templates to ease your workload, but your posts still must be interesting and valuable). Your content must also be attractive, timely, relatable, and, last but not least, understandable. It all boils down to how you can make your content more visually appealing than the others.

Don’t neglect your visuals

There are a lot of options when posting content on social media. Facebook, for example, allows users to post text, video, or graphics on their pages. Instagram has these, too, and TikTok has recently allowed its users to post text-only content.

However, posting just walls of text on social media is a poor way of getting the right attention for many reasons on many platforms. Firstly, it’s the visual equivalent of an arid plot of land with a few tumbleweeds rolling around. Not many people enjoy looking at that sort of thing (but no judgment if you do.)

Second, it’s a gross underutilization of the functionality of modern social media platforms. Like, whyever would you choose to post just text when you can slap on photos and videos just as easily? Or, if you’re feeling particularly determined, you can slap the text on your photos or videos. Use them as captions or additional information. For those venturing into competitive platforms like TikTok, enhancing post visibility through visuals is crucial.

Some businesses even explore options like buying TikTok likes to boost their initial engagement and attract a wider audience.

Go the extra mile for your international audiences and include translated subtitles on your videos, making them all the more inclusive and likelier to get more engagement from foreign users.

Third, humans are highly visual creatures. The human brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text. Articles, statistics, and other complex information that are presented in infographics format are 300% more likely to be shared. Images get more attention on social media than text posts. Videos do 1200% better than texts in terms of user engagement — and this is why TikTok exists in the state it does today.

But what if I can only post text?

Now, even if somebody were to put a gun to your head and demand that you only post using text, there are still many ways to make it more appealing to read. For example, you can break down paragraphs into shorter, snappier sections.

It makes your text more inviting.

There’s less information to filter.

There are more white spaces to make it easier on the eyes.

It promotes brevity, giving readers the impression that you don’t want to waste their time.

Lastly, it helps keep the notoriously short attention spans of today’s internet users.

You can use different fonts as long as you don’t overdo it.

You can also play around with text formats to drag users’ attention to parts you want them to focus on, LIKE SO.

Be S.M.A.R.T.

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A quick Google search about the best way to maximize your social media presence will yield many results, but here’s one thing that will always be present: S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S.M.A.R.T goals is a framework used by people ranging from marketers to aspiring homeowners and everyone in between. It is used to generate strategic, quantifiable objectives for various contexts, and they stand for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. I could harp on about how this can impact your social media marketing strategy, but I’d rather give you a live example.

Let’s say Robert put up a refurbished graphics card sales business. After doing his due diligence, he figured his target audience was techy youngsters looking to build their first PCs on a budget. They tend to congregate on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, so he sets up accounts there and starts his marketing campaign. Now let’s see this in action according to S.M.A.R.T.

Specific

Robert’s first objective is to define his goals for the social media campaign. Let’s say he wants to post three unique pieces of content per week and reach at least a thousand weekly audience, with a prospective 10% conversion rate across all platforms. So that’s a 100-sales per week target. Be activeThe more consistently you post content on social media, the bigger the chance you’ll get bumped up in the algorithm.

Everything is clearly defined before moving forward.

Measurable

As mentioned, Robert’s goals are three posts, a thousand audiences reached, and 100 weekly sales. These are all quantifiable goals, which can then be tracked as the days and week progress to see close or how far he is from the objective. Analytics from social media and adtech platforms can be a huge help in gathering data for marketing purposes.

Achievable

In his feasibility study, Robert noted that a well-established competitor is managing to sell 500 used graphics cards a week via social media. This is a nice goal to set in the long run, but Robert’s business is just new, so adjustments to the overall numbers should be made. That’s why he settles for a more realistic goal of 100 per week.

Relevant

This is simple enough: the business is about selling graphic cards, so the goal is to sell more via social media. As long as your short-term goal aligns with your overall business objective, this should be good and clear.

Time-bound

Creating deadlines or cutoffs for business goals is one of the best ways to help it through completion. The sense of urgency and a time limit can bring focus to the task at hand. In this case, three posts a week are well within Robert’s ability, and the quality of the content should help with the sales conversion.

Explore, experiment, and innovate

Back in 2011, The Coca-Cola Company launched a marketing campaign named “Project Connect” in Australia. This campaign removed the name “Coca-Cola” on their packaging — a risky move in any other situation — and replaced it with “Share A Coke with,” followed by a name. Because of this, the company sold more than 250 million bottles of Coke in a single summer (in a country with only 23 million people, no less) and created a social media phenomenon that has never been matched since.

The Coca-Cola Company launched the renamed “Share a Coke” campaign to the rest of the world, taking a couple hundred of a country’s most popular names and putting them on bottles. For the next few months, social media feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were flooded with photos of Coke bottles bearing the poster’s names or their friends and family. The simple change in the logo created a vibrant connection with the consumers and made the experience of drinking a can of Coke feel more personal. It was a stroke of genius from a marketing perspective and an object lesson in how simple innovation can have a lasting impact on the brand.

Final thoughts

These are just some of the many, many strategies and best practices when attempting to grow your social media presence. The important thing to keep in mind is that situations and trends on the internet are often fluid, and you will need to stay on top of them to maximize your social media use.