Building awareness of your brand on social media can sometimes feel like a very daunting task. Which channels should you be using? What should you be posting about? How do you engage your audience? How regularly should you be posting?

It doesn’t have to be a scary, time-consuming task that you keep putting to the bottom of your workload. However, having a calendar and a schedule is essential. That way you won’t fall into bad habits of leaving your social media channels unattended for months on end, then spamming your audience for two weeks!

Did you miss our preparing for Black Friday blog? It included some great tips for social media scheduling which are applicable to any campaign you are running.
Plan & Schedule Your Social Media Campaigns | Laser Red, Digital Marketing Agency

Social media is not just a fad!

You may think – my business doesn’t need to be on social media, it’s not the right place for my audience. Well, you might want to rethink this – with over 2.39 billion users this year, and a predicted 2.72 billion users by 2019 can you really afford to lose out on all of that potential brand awareness?

Social Media Audiences Are Rising | Laser Red

How do you get started?

So once you have put together some sort of calendar or spreadsheet, you need to develop some clear goals. These need to align to your overall business goals, and should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely). So in essence, something like – ‘we will increase our Facebook following by 100 over the next month’. You are giving yourself a deadline, a specific target, and it is achievable within that timeframe.

Make Your Social Media Goals SMART | Laser Red. Digital Marketing Agency

It is all very well producing amazing content that your audience loves and engages with, but if you are not encouraging them to carry out a desired action, what is the point? You should clearly let your audience know what is expected of them.

For example, if you are running a competition to spread the word of your product range and raise brand awareness, you should clearly state that your audience need to like, comment and share the post.

Don’t just expect them to know what to do. Also (a handy tip from us) – choose a winner who actually follows your page! Lots of people will actively like and share competitions without following the business’ page at all.

Conduct a social media audit

If you already have social media accounts setup, spend time analysing these. There is no point going helter skelter into a new social media campaign without looking at your existing channels. Take a look at what is working, what isn’t, and the style of posts that your audience seem to engage and interact with more.

Use this information to start building your social media calendar, including a range of post types. Have a look at your competitor’s social media channels too – you may pick up some things that they are doing which just aren’t working. You are both trying to engage a similar audience, so learn from their mistakes!

Test & evaluate

Once you have started to implement your new social media schedule and content, you need to review this on a regular basis. Constantly testing new techniques and checking your social media analytics is essential.

Test & Evaluate Your Social Media Campaigns | Laser Red

Many of the social media tools where you can schedule content to automatically go live at certain times (such as Hootsuite or Buffer), have their own analytics inbuilt. Combining this information with your Google Analytics account will give you a real insight into how potential customers are engaging with your brand.

From best post types, to seeing the time of day that your posts get the most interaction. Use this data to tweak your social media campaign, and watch your audience grow.

I hope this has been useful for you all, and has given you some direction on how to get your business on social media. If you would like any more advice, or to book in some social media training drop me an email [email]marketing@laser.red[/email].