Give Your Business a Fresh Start on Social Media With These 5 Tips
Social media is one of the most important marketing channels available to small businesses today. 96% of small business owners use social media, and for good reason, as 50% of consumers follow brands on social media to learn about new products and services, and 70% of consumers with a pleasant social media experience are likely to recommend a brand to others.
But what do you do if your social media marketing efforts aren’t getting you the results you want? Maybe your engagement is low, your follower count is dropping, or you haven’t seen any positive impact on your sales. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean that you should throw your hands up and give up on social media entirely. Instead, it might simply signify that it’s time for a social media refresh.
To help you out, this article will offer a step-by-step guide for giving your social media accounts a makeover to achieve your marketing goals and benefit from the tremendous power of social media marketing.
How Do I Know It’s Time for a Fresh Start on Social Media?
Sometimes, it’s obvious your social media marketing strategy isn’t working. If your follower count suddenly plummets or your inbox fills up with dissatisfied customers, it’s a pretty good sign that you need to make a change.
But, often, the reasons behind your social media’s decline aren’t quite as clear. So if you’re not sure whether or not it’s time to give your social media accounts a makeover, think about if the following statements apply to you.
You Don’t Know What Your Social Media Marketing Goals Are
If you’ve been chugging away and putting out content on social media, but you aren’t sure what you’re trying to achieve exactly, it’s probably a good idea to pause and reevaluate. After all, a social media strategy isn’t very strategic if you aren’t aiming for any particular outcomes. Your goals don’t have to be anything significant. In fact, it’s even better if they’re within arm’s reach. The most important part is just that you set goals to give you a sense of direction and purpose and a benchmark for tracking your progress.
You’re Not Meeting Your Social Media Marketing Goals
If you’ve created a social media strategy in the past with specific goals you intended to reach, you’ve set yourself up well to know whether or not you need to go back to the drawing board. If it’s been six months, a year, or even two years, and you’re still not close to meeting your goals, it’s most likely a sign that it’s time for a refresh.
Your Social Media Accounts Have Weak Branding
If your social media accounts are inconsistent, it might be time for a makeover. Inconsistency can present in several ways. Maybe your different platforms don’t have anything to do with each other. Perhaps your posts are all over the place. Maybe you even have different people posting to the same accounts using their different voices and formatting. All of these situations point to a need for a refresh.
Found yourself nodding along to any of the above? Then continue reading to discover how you can get a fresh start and develop an effective social media marketing strategy that will help you grow your brand and community, reach new customers, and help your bottom line.
Step 1: Audit Your Social Media Accounts
The first step in your social media fresh start will be to look at your current accounts. Perform an audit where you gather all the relevant information about your social media platforms, including data about how they’re doing. Data points to collect include:
- A list of all the social media accounts you have for your business
- Who has access to each account
- The usernames of each account
- The descriptions and logos of each account
- How many followers the account has
- Engagement levels
- How much traffic the accounts are sending to your website
It’s a great idea to organize all of this data in a spreadsheet for easy evaluation and comparison.
Once you have all of the information in one place, you can focus on identifying weak and strong areas and figuring out the ROI of your social media efforts. Does any one particular account stand out as much more or less successful than the others? Is there a platform you’re sinking a lot of time and effort into that isn’t actually getting you anywhere?
Step 2: Identify Areas for Improvement
This is your opportunity to revisit how you plan your social media presence and accounts for rethinking how you create, post, and promote your content. Using all of the data and insights you collected above, it’s now time to make a list of changes that you want to make to your social media accounts. Everything is eligible to be changed here, as long as the change serves a purpose.
This stage is a great opportunity to determine which accounts are working for you and which may be less successful so that you can focus your energy and efforts on the social media platforms that are really moving the needle.
By the end of this step, you should have a list of measurable social media marketing goals. Here are some examples of practical goals to help inspire you in creating yours.
- Reach x followers on our Instagram account by Q4
- Have a reach of at least x on each Twitter post
- Increase website traffic by x percent
- Receive at least x comments per Facebook post
Step 3: Build a Content Strategy
Now you’re ready for the next step of your refresh, which is to build out a content strategy using the information you’ve gathered and the goals you’ve created in the steps above. A content strategy is your approach to creating content that will help you achieve business objectives. It focuses on the why and how of your content marketing approach and determining ways to track the success of your efforts.
As part of your content strategy, you’ll want to be able to answer the following questions:
- How will we use content?
- Why will we use content?
- What are our content marketing goals?
- How do our content marketing goals connect to our larger business goals?
- How will we achieve our content marketing goals?
- What does our general content creation workflow look like?
- Who is involved?
- What does the success of any particular initiative look like?
- How is data tracked?
- What metrics matter?
- How is success measured?
- What are our performance goals?
Your content strategy should drive all of your decision-making regarding the content you create and publish on your social media accounts. Anytime you are uncertain about how to proceed, you can look to your content strategy as a guiding light to help give you direction and clarity.
Step 3: Find Solutions For Your Content Goals
As you prepare a content strategy and plan, it’s essential to hone in on the best practices, tools, and solutions that will help you determine what kind of content to post and which processes to use to do so. Below, we share several tips, tricks, and tools that you should keep in mind to help your new content strategy succeed.
Post Regularly
When it comes to social media content, posting consistently is key. This will help you create trust with your audience, improve brand recognition, and get your content in front of more eyes. As a result, you’ll get more clicks, engagement, and followers.
Below, we offer a handy graph of the ideal posting frequency for each social media platform.
| Social Media Platform | Ideal Posting Frequency | Source |
| 2 feed posts per week and 2 stories per day | Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri | |
| Once a day to 5 times a month | Hubspot | |
| Once per day | LinkedIn’s guide for small businesses | |
| YouTube | At least one video per week | Strategist Maria Concepcion Zabala |
It can be tricky to create and track so much content, so it’s highly recommended to work with a content planner. It will allow you to plan and schedule your content ahead of time to save time and maintain a consistent posting flow.
Prioritize Visual Content
When scrolling through your Facebook or LinkedIn feed, what’s more, likely to grab your attention, a paragraph of text or a colorful infographic? If you’re like most people, you probably said the infographic. After all, of all content types, visual formats are 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. That’s why it’s highly recommended to prioritize creating and posting visual content such as photos, images, infographics, and videos.
Use Videos
Not sure exactly which type of visual content to create? You can’t go wrong with videos. 85% of marketers rank short-form videos as the most effective type of social media content in 2021.
Don’t worry; you don’t have to be a multimedia pro to be able to make compelling social media videos. Promo offers an easy online video editor with thousands of video templates that you can customize in just a few clicks for every industry, occasion, and use case.
Create Valuable Content
Okay, so you know you should post a lot of content on social media, preferably with plenty of visuals and videos. But… what exactly should that content be about?
When in doubt, follow the golden rule of content: provide value. What does this mean? Well, if you want people to look at, follow, and engage with your social media accounts, you’ll have to give them a reason to do so. Nobody will be looking at your posts just to do you a favor. Instead, you should aim to create content that has value for your audience.
There are many types of value available for social media content. You could be educating your audience with tutorials, tips, fun facts, and information. You could be entertaining them with funny videos or compelling stories. Maybe you want to offer them resources, pointing them to relevant websites and other social media accounts that they might be interested in looking at. Or perhaps you’ll offer special promotions and discounts for the followers of your social media accounts.
You have many options here, and you don’t have to choose between them. A strong social media presence uses all sorts of valuable content. It’s excellent to combine engaging, resourceful content with content pushing sales and promotions. The most important thing is to give your audience a reason to follow you on your social media.
Engage with Trends and Current Events
Finally, we highly recommend staying topical and relevant on your social media. This means keeping up with new trends, current events, national holidays, and social media holidays. Participate in the latest silly TikTok challenge. Send your audience greetings for the upcoming holiday. Use trending hashtags to participate in interesting cultural conversations.
To help you keep track of online trends, check out these resources:
A social media content calendar is an incredibly useful tool for helping you keep track of all of the upcoming holidays and occasions that you want to post about. It will allow you to stay organized and plan ahead to always have content ready to keep your social media accounts full of fresh, relevant content.
Step 4: Execute Your Game Plan
Armed with a content strategy and the best tips and tools of the trade, you’re officially ready to enter the execution phase of your social media makeover! This is the stage where you will implement the changes you decided on earlier.
This can mean focusing on accounts that yield success, changing the branding of your accounts to be more uniform, removing irrelevant posts, and so on. It also means beginning to implement your new content strategy, posting according to your decisions about the type of content you want to create to meet your goals.
Note that it can be tricky to keep track of all of the changes you want to make. A content planner can help you stay organized, knowing what changes you’ve already completed and which you still have left to implement. It will also allow you to track your content strategy so that you never have to be uncertain about whether or not a particular video actually got posted or what topic you’re meant to be tweeting about on any given day.
Step 5: Track Your Success
Remember all of that emphasis we put earlier on tracking the success of your social media marketing efforts? This is when all of that comes into play. Because there is no point in executing a sweeping, strategic, multi-step social media makeover if you have no way to tell whether it’s working.
Tracking data is key to helping you see how your social media accounts are doing to determine whether or not you are meeting your goals and constantly making improvements. You won’t have to do an entire head-to-toe makeover again, just some little touch-ups here and there.
Metrics that you can potentially track include:
- Impressions – the number of times your content is shown to users
- Reach – the number of users who see your content
- Audience growth rate – the speed at which your number of followers grows
- Engagement rate – the number of likes, comments, and shares on your content
- Click-through rate – the percentage of times a user sees a link to your content and clicks on it to get your website
- Referrals – the source from which a user came to your website
- Social share of voice – how many people are mentioning your brand on social media compared to your competitors
While no one of these metrics can singlehandedly tell you that you are succeeding or failing, looking at a number of them together will be able to give you a clearer picture of whether or not you’re making positive progress toward your social media marketing goals.
Enjoy Your Fresh Start!
Congratulations! If you’ve followed all of these steps, you should be well on your way to a significant social media glow-up. With some new goals, a fresh content strategy, and some powerful tips and tools, you should soon be seeing some significant positive changes on your social media accounts to benefit from the power of social media marketing.
