When it comes to reaching audiences and building a well know following around your brand, social media offers a wealth of possibilities. It is where your audience and potential customers already live and engage with content. In business, social media is used to market products, promote brands, connect to current customers and foster new business. Popular Social Media Platforms have become marketing giants, offering business valuable data about their customers and an easy way to reach them. Social media can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way.

If you are looking at how social media can benefit your business, it’s vital that you understand how social media marketing works.

  • Quality Content & Maintaining an active Presence is a key strategy. Maximizing the quality of your content is extremely important. Each share in social media is a chain of reaction where brand messaging is relayed to an entirely new audience, which can help to generate leads and sales. If you publish amazing & interesting quality content and work to built your online followers, they will share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs and more.
  • Creating Compelling Headlines is a must. This is what grabs people’s attention. Your headline needs to be catchy and enticing, but also clearly explaining what sort of information you will be sharing.
  • Choose effective visuals. Including a visual element like a picture, video or animated gif potentially adds value and engagement to your post.
  • Creating interesting content that sparks conversations and adds value to social media requires Listening to your targeted online audience. Through daily active engagement and social listening, you can gather relevant customer data and valuable information about your competitor’s performance, something you can use to your advantage, using that specific information to make smarter business decisions.   
  • “Focused” Social Media Content. When you release content, it is vital to provide something that is beneficial to your audience. A highly focused social media content marketing strategy intended to built a strong brand, has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to everyone.
  • Post at the right times.  In order to maximize the number of eyes that see your post and content, you need to post your messages at optimal times. Scheduling out your post so they are released during high traffic times can really help boots shares and views. 

There has been a good deal of research conducted in regards the best times to share content on social media sites. For instance, Facebook posts receive higher engagement on Thursday, Fridays and the weekends during 9am and between 1 pm to 4 pm. Twitter, on the other hand, is more active during the day from 12 pm to 5 pm, with higher activity during midweek. Instagram has better engagement in the mornings on a Monday, with lower engagement during the afternoon hours.

    https://coschedule.com/blog/social-media-best-practices-for-business/ 

  • Built Relationships. You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person, so make sure you do not ignore them online.  Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success. This kind of social media dialogue between brands and customers is something traditional advertising cannot achieve, so make sure you always acknowledge every person who reaches out to your business.
  • Reciprocity. You can't expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don't do the same for them.  A portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others and sooner or later, they will be doing the same with your content.

Social media presents so many opportunities and benefits to help you grow your business. By using it to learn more about your customers, engage with your audience, create and distribute better content and extend your brand reach, you’ll be converted before you know it.