According to Statista, 2.82 billion people are active social media users and we will have around 3.1 billion social media users by 2021. That’s a third of the world’s population. Over the past decade, social media has turned into a gold mine for brands. If used aptly and judiciously, brands strike gold. There have been a number of small businesses, like Huda Beauty and DesignerDaddy, that went viral due to their social media strategies.

Also, 69% of the adult population of the US, use at least one social media platform. So by just the sole use of social media, you can build awareness for your brand and make great savings on advertisement and marketing. If you want to gain insights on what your customer wants, simply talk to them on social media. You can even target customers from all over the world, so if you want to grow your brand, social media is a great place, to begin with. 

So make the most out of your social media platforms and grow!

1. Use Stories to Show Off Your Brand’s Personality 

After Snapchat created its platform for stories, Facebook and Instagram followed suit. Stories pave the way for your business to personalize your brand, make it more relatable to your customers, show it off in an interesting light, and subsequently generate leads. 

Brands and influencers regularly post behind-the-scenes pictures and videos on stories, to show their followers how they make their products, conduct a shoot, show the places they traveled, the set-backs they faced, and about what they’re going to do next. Whatever they do, their followers know all about it as if it’s their friend. 

You can ask your audience some questions or let your audience ask you a question in order to engage them in fun conversations. You can conduct polls over what flavor of your product the customer prefers, which can lead to a purchase decision. You can post about teasers, which can spark their interest and curiosity. Post about a product in the making, which can serve to develop trust in your product. All of these efforts, serve to humanize your brand; and rather than generating mere customers, they generate fans and evangelists. 

With the swipe-up feature, the follower can reach your website. Also, the stories disappear after 24 hours, but you have the option to save it as a highlight on your profile. 

2.  Align your Advertising Strategy with Current Trends

Social media gives birth to trends. Your customer’s newsfeed is overflowing with the current trend. You don’t want your audience scrolling through their newsfeed and finding every post affiliated with the trend, save for yours. Which may give the impression that you are not up-to-date or relatable. So keep up with the latest trend and align your content with that trend. 

An arrow trend on Instagram was running in India, brands then employed their creativity and imbued themselves into the fad. We then witnessed a number of ads on Instagram made up of simple arrows, and followers enthused about them, shared and made those go viral. 

3. Social Media Influencers Will Influence Your Customers

Influencers and bloggers are a sure way to legitimize your brand. These are the people, your target customers listen to and wax lyrical about, that’s why they are called influencers. If an influencer vouches for your brand, your brand visibility is going to take off. One such instance was of New York Bakery, which went viral after a food blogger tried their newest item on the menu: the Cronut. The New York Bakery experienced a surge in its website traffic by 300% and the Cronut’s popularity flourished.

Look for influencers from your industry, follow them on social media, follow and interact with their content, mention them in a positive context, foster a relationship. Then ask them to review your product or service. This might cost you, but the returns will be exorbitant. Once the influencer posts positive reviews about your product or service, the major chunk of their followers are definitely going to try it. So, one crucial thing you have to take care of is your quality. Reputed bloggers with faithful followers, will always go for honest reviews. So lack of quality will awfully backfire your influencer marketing strategy. Therefore, take care of your quality, the influencers will take care of the rest.

4. Customer Reviews are Powerful

As per BrightLocal’s survey, 86% of people check online for local customer reviews and trust those reviews implicitly. It’s really imperative that your business builds a credible reputation and prioritizes its quality. All those marketing tactics wouldn’t matter if consumers are dissing your brand online. If such instance occurs, when you have got a disgruntled customer with bad reviews, then address that customer on that forum and attempt to placate them. It will show you to be a caring brand, who immensely values their customers. Also, you can capture your customer’s experience and post them over the stories.  

A creative social media strategy is cardinal for your brand’s visibility, which will consequently impact your business’s growth. These are just roadmaps for you over where to begin, but you will have to draw on your creativity to make those strategies effective and successfully engage your customers.

About The Author: Tina Anderson is a passionate writer with a core interest in digital marketing. Apart from writing for different online magazines, she also writes for BuyTVInternetPhone. She has a burgeoning collection of broken and weirdly-shaped clay pots she made via her pottery-making endeavors.