With social media now a well established tool for businesses, and a huge part of day-to-day life for most people, it is more important than ever to ensure your business or brand maintains a presence, keeps up to date with all current trends and utilises them to your advantage. With that in mind, here are some of the key trends from 2019 and some tips from ewa-ha.com on how you can harness and adapt them to work for your business.
Employee Brand Engagement
Over the last few years, many brands have used this simple but effective method of creating social brand ambassadors with current employees. This could be anything from sharing and engaging with your brand’s content to publishing thought leadership pieces and participating in interviews for industry publications. As a 2018 article in Harvard Business Review put it; “employee brand engagement establishes a critical link between employees and customers”. Obviously, the further up they are in the hierarchy, the more impact this is likely to have; a CEO will probably have a larger audience than a lower-level worker.
Targeted Ads
Targeted ads are becoming more and more popular, with brands from every industry setting aside some budget for highly targeted social advertising. The key aspect here is the detail; key audiences and demographics can be reached in a few clicks with the content of your choosing. Everything from location and engagement with your page to lookalikes and niche interests. If applicable, life events like weddings and Christmas are always a sure-fire way to get results.
There is also scope for avoiding criticism as you can even exclude people with certain interests which is a very handy tool for avoiding negative comments on your ads. Recently in a campaign for one of our clients British Wool, we were able to use this to great effect, excluding anyone with an interest in veganism from the targeted ads, as the brand had been wrongly criticised by vegans for the product. Since then, this has significantly decreased with little to no negative comments appearing across the company’s channels.
Repurpose High Performing Content
Creating high-quality content can help your brand achieve various goals including increased website traffic, improved online presence and better brand reputation. Therefore, it’s important to maximise your content that performs the best. Everyone strives to create ‘unicorn’ content and if you manage to do so, repurposing it is an obvious option. However, unicorn content is only likely to happen every so often though, so it is best practice to look at the top-performing ‘standard posts’ for more regular content and maximise the performance of the best performing posts.
First of all, determine which posts gain the most engagement organically. Digging into your Google Analytics helps here, as you can figure out very quickly what is performing best. Then use that as a template for new content with boosting budget behind it to further drive engagement. This can be done on an extremely targeted basis, utilising however much budget you put behind the post(s) and therefore drastically increasing your chances of gaining more likes, link clicks, shares or whatever the objective is for that particular piece of content.
Be Responsive
There’s no hiding place in the age of social media. Complaints and negative comments are in the public domain for all to see. Many users will pose customer service enquiries straight to social media as they see this as a chance to get an immediate response. Generally, it is better to be responsive than ignore this aspect of social media. According to an article on Freshsparks.com, 53% of users expect a response within the hour and on Twitter, this jumps to 72%. Practicing this automatically puts your brand at an advantage from a business perspective from those who don’t. Research suggests that nearly half of consumers on social media expect to be responded to within an hour, making speed an important factor as well. You also have to make sure that the invoices you are sending your customers have the right template, like a construction invoice template, for a professional looking bill.
Use Social Listening Tools
Social listening tools can be an extremely effective way of getting to know what your audience wants in terms of social content. There are multiple social listening tools and software available; Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Awario to name a few. All of which can gather and analyse data from your social channels giving you valuable insights and enabling you to create up to date and relevant content for your audiences. You can find related phrases and streamline your campaign accordingly. As a blog post on Hoostsuite states, social listening tools allow you to “Tweak your strategy in real-time.” This lets you be adaptable and keep up to date with ever-changing audience demands.
At Prohibition, we help a variety of brands to create engaging social media strategies that help to achieve their business goals. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you: hello@prohibitionpr.co.uk.
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