Best Social Media Practices

1. Define Your Target Audience

It’s really hard to create content when you are clueless about who they’re meant for. Understanding your target audience in depth is imperative to you social media success. Most social media fail stories occur due to following a generalized path when creating content.

Here are some factors that you must understand about your target audience:

• Age range
• Gender
• Location
• Where do they spend time
• What do they typically purchase
• What brands are they loyal to

The reason that you must learn these about your audience is due to your planning of execution for creating content. From here, you can easily decide the tone of voice that you will use to communicate and create content. For example, you may not want to use the same tone to communicate on LinkedIn compared to your tone on Instagram. In addition, you’ll be learning how to target your audience via local hashtags such as #city #localmall #brands #interests/hobbies.

2. Research Competitors

At this point you may still be unsure of what types of content you should create. Which is why we look at our competitors for content marketing examples. At this stage you are searching for social media trends and social media strategies that you’re top competitors are utilizing. A huge factors that fit inside a social media strategy is the core message that’s communicated in gathering attention.

Head on to your competitors profile and pay close attention to each post and the core message behind each post. What you’ll see is a common trend that they are executing within each social media post.

Make sure to pay close attention to your competitor’s call-to-action within each post. Your competitor’s call-to-action can be to visit their website, subscribe to their podcast, or to join their movement by tagging other friends.

Find the types of content that they are typically posting. Are they doing more videos than pictures? Or are they publishing more written content such as blogs? Whatever it may be, there is a good reason for it, which is why you should be taking notes. They have fully understood their target audience and how they prefer to consume content. Please note the consistency between their posts. Perhaps they’re only posting once a day, but each post is a call-to-action to visit their blog which they’re publishing twice a day. This is important so that we are not thrown off by their consistency in publishing content, and so we can better understand where they are most active.

Lastly, check the number of hashtags they are using in each social media post, and what those hashtags are. This will give you better insights to your target audience and what they’re interested in.

3. Keyword Research

If you’re searching for different topics to create content but are unsure, then a quick keyword research will provide better ideas on what people are typically searching for. There are many tools available but my favorites are Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Keywords Everywhere.

4. Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar will simplify your life and automate your social media process. It is crucial to not speed through this step. You must create content that will have a positive social media impact on your target audience. Which means that your content must either educate or entertain.

First, jot down the topics of each content that you will create. Input them in your calendar for the next week, or if you can handle it, plan your content for the next month. Secondly, find the best times to post on each social media platform.

Once you’ve created the content, then automate. This is also crucial because if you’re running a full time business, it will be difficult to step aside and publish your content at the best times. Instead we can use tools such as Zoho Social to schedule our posts to publish at the best times to post on social media. Don’t forget about your hashtags! Sometimes it can be hard to come up with 30 hashtags for a handful of posts. This is why we use tools such as TopTager or Ingramer to help us generate relevant hashtags.

5. Ignore The Trolls and Keep Your Eyes On Insights

If you’ve already faced that one person who is coming after you in your comments, then just keep your head up and don’t lose focus. Remember that trolls are the outcomes of being subconscious. But you, you’re a go getter who knows how to do social media the right way with an in-depth content marketing strategy. That being said, make sure to not ignore you customer’s complaints, as this will lower your brand’s credibility. Respond quickly and loudly so that everyone can see that you care with a passion to resolve any issues that arise within your brand.