How To Use Social Media Marketing To Boost Your Online Authority

As a small or mid-size business, do you know that a properly executed social media marketing and management strategy can boost your online presence?

Besides the time you spend on your core business, do you have the time or effort necessary to cultivate a proper presence on multiple social media platforms relevant to your marketing goals?

A few years ago many marketers and business owners would be responding to that question with another question – ‘what is social media marketing?’

However, with more than 2.3 billion active social media users, you can understand why social media has become a major part of many brands' marketing strategies.

That said:

Though it is ridiculously easy and free to sign up to all the major social media platforms, creating an online presence that rocks are not for the faint at heart.

To be the 'go to' brand online, you need a massively dominant social media presence.

You also need a user-friendly and responsive website as your digital storefront.

So, in this article, you will learn 11 different ways to skyrocket your social media presence and achieve your marketing goals.

Let's get started.

How Social Media Marketing Boosts Your Online Presence

#1. Identify Your Target Audience

The first step in boosting your online presence is to identify who your target audience is. In other words, you need to know your buyer persona.

What is a buyer persona?

HubSpot defines a buyer persona this way: "A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better".

Since this is highly important in achieving your online goals, you need to write down the answers to the following questions:

Who are your typical customers?
How old are are your typical customers?
Are they mainly males or females?
Where do they live?
How much money do they make?
How much education do they have?
Besides your products or services, what else are they interested in?

Detailed answers to these questions will help you build a great profile of your audience.

A well-developed buyer persona would help you understand your ideal customer and increases your efficiency.

It also helps you to segment your customers and makes it easy for your sales team to know whom they're targeting and who they're not targeting.

# 2: Define Your Social Media Goals

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Now that you have developed your detailed buyer persona, it is time to define your goals for that audience.

By boosting your online presence on social media, your small or mid-sized business can perform customer care, engage with customers and generate tons of leads.

Also, you grow your audience, generate leads and sales, draw insane traffic to your website, gain insights and feedback, from your customers, and much more.

However, savvy social media marketers use S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) strategy to craft their marketing goals.

Dabbling into social media by posting blindly and expecting to achieve massive amounts of new sales would be like a blind man throwing darts and expecting to hit the target.

You already know the result.

But by setting marketing goals before you start your social media marketing journey, it becomes easier to measure your success or failure.

In creating your social media goals, brainstorm a list of both typical and unusual ways social media could work for your brand.

As you do, remember that social media marketing is mainly about customer engagements and providing solutions to their pain points rather than selling.

Therefore, the goals you set should not be focused on money or return on investment.

And rightly so.

Here are goals you can set:

Brand Awareness

An example of S.M.A.R.T.'s goal will be to add 900 Twitter followers at the end of the month.

Boost Public Relations

A great example of S.M.A.R.T.'s goal is to gain 10 5-Star reviews on Google My Business in three months.

Research And Development

A great example of an awesome S.M.A.R.T.'s goal is to engage with 10 customers a month on all your relevant social media platforms about their pain points for three months.

Build Brand Evangelists

An example of S.M.A.R.T.'s goal is to get 10 retweets on Twitter within three months.

Generate Leads And Sales

An Example of S.M.A.R.T.'s goal is to average 5% Click Through Rate (CTR) on Tweets by the end of your business calendar year.

#3. Develop Your Social Media Strategy

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After you've defined your S.M.A.R.T. goals, the next step is the strategy.

Now:

What's the difference between goals and strategy?

A goal is a result that you want to accomplish while a strategy is a method you use to achieve your goals.

For instance, if you're in Houston and you plan to be in Lagos within 6 months, that's a goal.

How you plan to get from Houston to Lagos within 6 months is the strategy.

You can create long-term or short-term goals depending on your strategies.

Now that you have a plan, it's time to work your plan – strategy.

A social media strategy is simply a detailed and written blueprint of your social media goals.

It details when you want to accomplish them and how you intend to accomplish them.

The strategy is accomplished by posting different content on your different social media platforms.

An effective social media strategy is far more involved than just posting, tweeting, and retweeting.

Every post addresses the needs and pain points of the target audience. And also the goal that you want to achieve from the post.

To be successful with your social media strategy, you have to understand your buyer persona.

Understanding your target audience or buyer persona makes it simply easy for you to know what they are looking for.

That insight helps you understand how their pain points align with your marketing goals.

Being familiar with your audience helps you to know the best way to arrest their attention, keep them engaged and be ready when they want to buy your product or services.

These questions help you come up with a good strategy when creating your social media campaigns:

Who are your target customers (buyer persona)?
>Have you considered the different kinds of content you would share with different segments of your persona on your multiple social media platforms?
What social media channels would you use?
How do you want them to see your brand?
What are the goals, or results you want to achieve?

It is perfectly okay to have more than one social media goal and also more than one persona. I recommend it

Besides, build a different strategy for each of your chosen social media channels.

Some small or mid-sized businesses, use Facebook to generate new sales leads.

And then hop over to Instagram to share human, helpful, and holistic visually impactful content.

And then they use the YouTube channel for entertainment and informational videos.

#4. Choose Your Social Media Platforms

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Now that you know your target audience (buyer persona), marketing goals, and strategy, it is easier to choose the best social media channels that align with your audience and social media marketing goals.

However, as tempting as it is to be on most social media channels, your small or mid-sized business should start your online presence with a few channels.

The key to choosing the right platforms is having a thorough understanding of the functions and benefits of each channel.

So, let's learn more about the major social media channels.

Facebook: is the largest social media platform in the world. It has over two billion active users every month out of which 65 million businesses use its platform.

Companies use Facebook to strengthen their customer relationships, build brand awareness, drive insane traffic to their website, and gather valuable insights about their leads and customers.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world. According to Techcrunch, it has over 500 million users.

It is the most successful social media site for a business, in terms of networking and finding new talent.

LinkedIn is used by B2B and B2C brands to build trust, authority, and engagement with others.

Pinterest: As an image-sharing platform, it is awesome for businesses that have great visual appeal.

As of 2019, Pinterest had 322 million monthly active users. Most of the people on Pinterest are females.

According to eMarketer, seven out of every ten Pinterest users are female.

Brands that are using Pinterest include restaurants, fashion, art, travel, and photographers. Many females get inspiration on this site before making purchases.

It is great for driving sales.

Twitter: Twitter is a social media channel for real-time information. It is the platform for breaking news, entertainment, sports, politics, and much more.

The platform is so great for its simplicity and immediacy that many brands are using it as their main hub for customer care.

The fact that Twitter makes it possible for brands to respond to their customers immediately is considered by many as its edge.

Instagram: Instagram is a social media channel for sharing photos, videos, stories, and live videos.

It is one of the fastest-growing social media networks with over 1 billion monthly active users.

Over half of those monthly users are active on the platform every day.

71% of people that use Instagram are under the age of 35.

However, Instagram has gone through amazing changes over the years.

Today, it emphasizes making money through product placement.

With shoppable posts, you add tags to the products and services in your photos with links.

The link includes a description of the product or service, price and the ability to "shop now". The link takes the shopper to your online store.

With 72 percent of Instagram users buying a product through the platform, you should consider Instagram.

Instagram is a visual platform and doesn’t make sense for every brand.

The industries that dominate Instagram are auto, fashion, beauty, travel and, retail.

To be successful on Instagram, be guided by what the leading brands in your niche are up to on Instagram.

#5. Create And Curate Content That Appeals To Your Audience

content boosts online presence

For you to create and share content that is human, helpful and holistic, you have to know your audience pretty well.

Content creation is the process of generating topic ideas that appeal to your buyer persona.

Knowing the pain points and needs of your target audience makes it easy for you to create quality written or visual content around those ideas.

After the content is created, it is accessible to your audience as a blog, video, infographic, or other formats.

In addition to your content, use curated content that delights your audience.

Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter.

#6. Select Social Media Scheduling Tools

Boosting your online presence means being active and engaging on multiple social media platforms.

Managing many social media tasks takes time and demands dedication.

However, many social media management tools allow you to automatically publish content and schedule posts months in advance.

With social media management tools like Agorapulse, Sprout Social, Buffer, Hootsuite, BuzzSumo and many more, you can save time.

These apps also allow you to monitor your networks and respond to messages quickly.

#7. Maintain A Constant Presence And A Consistent Voice

It takes time to develop a brand on social media. But with social media scheduling tools, you can minimize the time you'll have to dedicate to social media.

These tools also help you to post consistently.

And speaking of posting frequency, the right number depends on the platform you're using.

It is important to have a consistent brand voice. So make sure that all your posts reflect your brand and image.