Social media has become an integral part not only of personal life but of corporate culture as well. Managing an account on Facebook or Twitter is as essential for promotion as the regular advertisement campaigns created by reputable agencies. However, optimizing the costs and maximizing positive effects with minimum expenses is crucial for startups that cannot yet afford to lose money on social media. Therefore they are constantly looking for new ways to optimize their social media campaigns and increase their online presence in general.
Here are a few tips offered by SEOs on how to better manage social media accounts with no additional costs:
1. Develop a clear goal
One of the most common mistakes that companies make on social media is having no clear view of what it is that they want to achieve through this platform. Strategy is not limited to promoting products – it involves creating a complex social media profile that should represent the company to the world, showing their image. Therefore, the first step is to decide what image is that going to be and determine the main focus of strategy. Does the startup want to be seen as socially conscious? Relatable? Client-oriented? Setting an image goal and working on achieving it through the social media strategy is essential.
2. Divide and Conquer
Every major social media platform has its own unique image and is best used within its range of capabilities. And people who prefer this or that social media more are different and need to be targeted in different ways. For example, Twitter is best used for short announcements – to deliver certain news, to introduce new products or improvements to an old one or even to post holiday congratulations. People on Twitter are usually subscribed to multiple accounts and have no time to read through all of their feed therefore information on Twitter is best kept short and to the point. Facebook, on the contrary, is a platform that allows going into details and creating engaging and extensive content. Making every peculiarity of a certain social network serve the company’s goal is both free and priceless.
3. Timing is key
One thing that can help to increase popularity is to post at times when the information is the most likely to be seen. It does not hurt to casually use a popular hashtag during major events like sports games or boxing matches to attract attention when people will surely be looking for sharing their experiences online. It can also be helpful to determine the perfect timing through trial and error – to post at different hours through the day and see which posts are getting more likes and shares.
4. Use social media optimization tactics
Social media optimization tactics is an umbrella term for every trick that marketers use to make more people notice their products. Optimization of information is one of those and it includes using images or photos, using hashtags, limiting the number of characters, using social CTA (shares, retweets) and many more. Optimizing information is essential since people are less and less likely to spend a lot of time on reading a long post filled with data when that same data could be presented in the form of a picture with a cute dog chilling in the background.
5. Use hashtags
Using hashtags is absolutely necessary in order to make a product more popular. It not only allows you to create a recognizable hashtag that can later be associated with a certain company, but to attract more users to your social media pages through more common hashtags used by millions of people every day (e.g. #relaxation, #vacation, #rest, #niceday). People are sure to be scrolling through popular and common hashtags and one of your posts just might spark their curiosity.
6. Keep your posts regular
In a world so full of information, it is incredibly easy to get lost and forgotten. And unless you are Taylor Swift, you should work on keeping your posts coming all the time even if only to remind people of your startup and what it does. Most marketers agree that you should post at least once a day and even more when your startup has something interesting going on. Increasing your online presence during major events in your own industry (e.g. during E3 for the gaming industry or Oscars for film production) is a good call as well.
7. Use free tools
It is not always necessary to pay large amounts of money and outsource your social media activities to a third party when there is a lot of free software designed for social media management around. There are a number of social media management tools that can help track and manage your social media accounts without upgrading to a pro account. Thanks to them, you can schedule and track your posts and all the activities around them, analyze the results of your social media strategy, determine which posts are more popular than others, and create social media content. For instance, Buffer offers optimal time slots for scheduled posts based on the social media activity of users. SocialRank is another media management tool that provides productivity enhancement solutions for social media including scheduling updates, finding pages to follow and monitoring social media activities. And Crello can help you with creating visuals with thousands of free templates, so you do not need to hire a professional designer or spend time on learning how to use complicated graphic design tools.
All in all, there are simple ways to optimize social media campaigns that are affordable even for a startup just beginning to develop its own strategy, create a recognizable brand image and inspire loyalty.
