Since its inception, social media has been a game-changer for many businesses and not just in an insignificant way. Now, every business is striving hard to gain a little bit of recognition through social platforms. In the earlier days, gaining social recognition had been easy; but now, excessive competition makes it difficult to leave a mark let alone improve social presence.

However, do not worry since improving social presence is just a game of strategies. Tweak this and that, boost this and remove that; if you plan your moves properly, you can win at this game. Here are 15 ways through which you can improve your presence and gain recognition.

• Selecting the Right Social Platform

Every other day, a new social app comes into the market. Although the idea of having your profile on every platform may seem profitable, the odds will never work in your favor. Let us just face the facts, your business profile will flourish on certain platforms and will fail at others. So, it is just a matter of identifying what will work and what will not.

For this purpose, you need to identify the platform that is popular among your target audience. Additionally, consider your goals because each social platform will help you achieve different targets. So, choose carefully!

• A Sound Social Media Strategy

If you are on social media platforms just because everyone else seems to be there, then you have a problem. Just being on social platforms is not going to help your business. Instead, you need to define goals that follow a SMART strategy. So goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound will always help in improving your presence.

If you want maximum audience engagement, make it your priority and if you want a surge in online website traffic, then your social media strategy should reflect this!

• A Consistent Brand Voice

A frequent voice change in your social media posts can confuse your target audience which is not something you want to experience. Since social media is the ideal place for building brand recognition, it is best to create content that reflects your brand’s value. So have someone from your team take responsibility for social media posting. Keep the number limited to only one individual as having multiple people control your business’ social profiles would wreak havoc.

Since everyone will try to incorporate their personality into the posts, it is better to let a specific individual handle the posting responsibility.  

• Target and Engage with Your Audience

To improve your social presence, you need to solidify your relationship with your target audience. The best way to do this is by identifying connection opportunities. Frequently analyze your profile and look for opportunities where you could chat with your audience. Through this, you will not only increase your conversion rate but will also improve your social presence.

Usually, audiences connect with a social brand that listens to them and values their opinions, and by increasing your social media interactions, you will be just doing that!

• Focus on Value, not on Blatant Advertising

Advertising your good on social platforms is good; however, if this is your only social strategy then you can say your followers’ goodbye!

Audiences value great content and if they are not getting it, they will ditch your profile for someone else. So, do not wait for your followers to leave and start pumping out great content. Provide your website’s contents as a link on your social profile and invite people to read them. Keep in mind that you need to provide all sorts of content like blogs, infographics, research, case studies, etc. to keep your readers hooked!

• Understand Your Consumers’ Needs

Understanding consumers’ needs is easier said than done. With your social presence on the line, you need to undertake certain measures to ensure your audience gets what they want!

So, use statistics, research, and data to try to find out what is expected from your business. Start with the basics and locate your target audience. You can also visit the niche groups and communities where your audience hangs out. Analyze the posts and comments to figure out the problems and issues faced by your audience. When you have enough data on your audience, use it in your favor by crafting posts that revolve around any specific consumers’ needs.

• Integrate Trendy Hashtags

Use trendy hashtags because there is no other better way of popping into your audiences’ feed! Hashtags can be specifically useful when it comes to your Twitter profile because of two reasons; Twitter provides a list of trending hashtags, secondly, it allows users to see tweets in a specific hashtag category.

When working with hashtags, not everything will work in your favor because there will always be some hashtags with no connection to your niche whatsoever. In this case, you can either leave them for other hashtags or craft creative posts that correctly fit the hashtag’s narrative.

Because of its popularity, other social platforms have started incorporating hashtags. So, make use of them in all of your social profiles, and only use them when the situation has a need for it!

• Optimize Your Social Account

Social media optimization is very different than the search engine. Here, you need to stay relevant by providing the right information, using keywords, and linking all the right things. Social media values appropriate business information, so enter all your business details correctly. Additionally, provide a link to your website in the description section. Whatever you do, keep in mind that a social media page that contains all the correct business information has a better chance at ranking in the SERPs.

You can also optimize your profile by incorporating targeted keywords, sharing visual content and custom-making a hashtag that your consumers can use to reach out to you!

• Trivia, Polls, and Games

The best way to engage your audience is by holding trivia, polls or anything that can make them feel appreciated. Audiences are easy to handle and if you can make them realize that their opinions matter to your business, your engagement stats would sky-rocket!

The best way to achieve it is by making your audiences share their opinions with you through polls. Additionally, you need to use the winning poll option to show that you care. Otherwise, there is no need to go through the trouble. You can also increase audience activity through small games and trivia. Make it easy for your audience to get the answers right because anything too difficult and your audience would lose interest.

• Focus on Building Relationships

We have mentioned it so many times and we are doing this again; you need to engage with your audience daily in order to create an impact on your social presence. There are various ways through which you can achieve that; for instance, you can create a custom hashtag that your audience can use to ask questions. By providing help, you will be cementing your relationship with your social audience. 

• Use Content Scheduling Tools

Scheduling social media posts play a significant role in managing an active social presence. You can assign the scheduling task to any member of your team. However, it is best to invest in post scheduling tools.

There are a number of scheduling tools, so it all comes to your budget and preference. When looking for a suitable tool, you need to broaden your search and pick a one that lets you do more than just scheduling posts!

• Make Customers’ Complaints a Priority

Often, businesses ignore bad comments or reviews, thinking they would disappear. But that is not how it happens and that should not be your strategy to deal with complaints. More often than not, there is an unsatisfied individual behind a complaint so figure out what went wrong.

You can get in touch with the said consumer and try to pinpoint the cause that turned their experience sour. You need to win back those customers but to do so you should offer a helping hand. So, do whatever it takes and win their positive response. 

Once satisfied, you can ask the specific customer to update their bad review, delete it or post a positive one altogether.

• Frequently Asked Questions

Is it not tiring when people ask the same questions every other day?! It can be burdensome, not to mention boring, to provide the same answer over and over again. The best way to tackle this situation is by creating an FAQ section on all your social profiles. Make a list of all the questions that people ask and enlist them in your FAQs section.

In this way, you will not only save your time but your audience will also get detailed answers to several crucial questions!

• Focus on Visual Content

Sometimes, words do not even begin to do justice to your creativity. In these instances, you need to focus on communicating crucial information through visual content. So, anything that ranges from infographics, videos, pictures, or gif can work in your favor.

Visual content has a proven record of having a positive impact on your business. So, focus on your business’ needs for visual content. That said, you can either create the visual content from scratch or repurpose old content to breathe new life into it!

• Stay Active

A social media profile that faces extended periods of inactivity will negatively impact your business. To save your business from this, you need to stay active; even if you do not have any valuable content to share.

Staying active on social media is probably the easiest thing out of all the strategies mentioned because if you do not have valuable content, you can repurpose content and re-share pictures. The possibilities are endless! However, this should never replace your need to have fresh and valuable content. So reserve some time out of your schedule and come up with ideas to keep your profile active!

Bottom Line

When it comes to improving social media presence, there are no shortcuts and no magical words which you can blurt out to instantly see results. You can, however, opt for companies offering professional digital marketing services, in which case you would not need to employ the above strategies. But then again, the fruit of success would not taste so sweet!

So work with all the strategies, experiment with techniques and set metrics to measure your results for an optimized social profile!

Author Bio:
Anne Taylor is a serial blogger with a technical and business background. She loves writing about digital marketing, IT industry and workplace productivity. She is currently the content writer for Dynamologic Solutions.