Maximizing Your Online Presence: How to Grow Your Business On Social Media

Growing your business on social media isn’t as simple as posting a few pictures on Instagram and hoping for the best. Smart businesses take a considered approach and develop a strategy for growth using the following steps:

#1. Define Your Goals

Without clearly defined goals you’re likely to waste considerable time on social media. Your goals act as clear points of focus, giving all your efforts direction – they’ll shape your strategy and also help you set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success.

Your social media goals will depend on the overarching goals of your business, but may include:

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate a certain number of leads
• Boost website traffic by a certain amount
• Generate a specific number of sales

Each goal should follow the SMART format – it should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, an actual lead generation goal may read as: “Generate 15 leads from social media activity every month.”

#2. Know Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience will help you identify where their attention is focused, and develop content that resonates with them.

Start by visiting your business’s current social media platforms or, if you’re new to it, I’d suggest finding your most closely matched competitors’ accounts. Look at who follows the account, who comments, likes and shares the posts, and see who has created the user generated content being shared with you, or if you’re looking at competitors’ accounts, by the business.

A generic search for the brand name on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok will also bring up accounts interacting with and talking about the brand!

Once you’ve started to find the customers, look for commonalities between key demographics like age, gender, and location.

It can also help visualize them as one person – or, if you’re targeting multiple demographics, a small handful of people – who is your ideal customer. When you’re imagining this ideal customer, consider the following questions to create a user persona:

• What are their interests? Perhaps they are artistic, sporty, or enjoy listening to a certain genre of music.
• What pain point and challenges do they face? What issue will your business be able to solve? This could be anything from being short on money or time, finding software complicated to use, or having products that break too easily.

Once you have this persona, you can build a content strategy that appeals directly to them, their interests, and the challenges they want to overcome.

#3. Select the Right Platforms

Now you know your goals and target audience, you can start to think about the platforms that align with them. To help you decide, here are some insights into four of the top platforms:

Instagram

Best at visual storytelling

Instagram has a huge range of formats for sharing news and products with your followers, which makes it extremely versatile. It’s well-suited for brands with a focus on visual storytelling, from jewelry and interior design to art exhibitions and fast food chains, because of its grid photo layout.

If you offer services – for example, hairdressing or tattoos – you’ll find the image-centric design of the platform particularly useful for showing your work. As well as this, you can also use stories to share last minute appointment cancellations and highlights – which can be pinned to the top of your profile to share any key policies and FAQs.

TikTok

Best for local search opportunities and reaching a young audience

If you’re wondering how to grow your business on social media, TikTok may have been one of the first platforms that came to your mind because of its generous algorithm. It has a content-first approach that lowers the barriers for entry and makes TikTok perfect for small businesses that cater to a young Gen Z audience.

It’s also a popular search engine, so it’s great for local businesses (particularly those popular with tourists, like food businesses, activities, and bars) to share their offerings and promotions.

One thing to note is that TikTok is at the forefront of ever-changing social media trends, so you’ll need to be able to keep up with these, adapt, and react quickly to keep up – which can often mean scrapping future scheduled content.

Facebook

Best for reaching very specific audiences and driving website traffic

Facebook – the most used social media platform in the world – has some brilliant tools for businesses that run flash sales, offers, or promotions.  For instance, posts with external links show an attention grabbing preview image of the page, so are a great way to drive traffic to your site. Plus, Facebook Ads’ advanced targeting options (demographics, behaviors, and interests) make it suitable for even the most niche businesses.

The main downside of using Facebook for business is that the platform is oversaturated with users, so it can be hard to get noticed without using effective targeted ads.

X (Formerly Twitter)

Best for researching and communicating with your customers and competitors

X is unique to other platforms in that it caps posts at 280 characters, and said posts are designed to have a short lifespan. The short and snappy style of X’s posts make it a popular platform for temporary posts like job listings and company news. The conversational tone also gives you the opportunity to build relationships with customers and competitors online and provide customer service.

#4. Develop a Consistent Brand Voice

Did you know that a huge 71% of buyers prefer to buy from brands they recognise? This is why creating a strong, memorable brand personality is vital if you want to grow your business on social media.

You should start by developing a strong brand voice, which is simply the tone in which your business communicates with your audience.

Let’s revisit the customer personas we formed earlier. What relationship do you want your brand to have with your audience? For example, if you sell fast fashion clothing, you might want to be a trendy friend, but if you sell shower products, you’ll more likely want to be seen as a caregiver.

Once established, it’s important to maintain your brand voice across all communication channels including social media, email, and website copy. After all, research shows that consistent presentation will make you 3.5 times more likely to grow than those who don’t do this.

Fast-moving social media trends give brands plenty of opportunity to express their personality. Duolingo, for example, has amassed 14.3 million TikTok through bringing their mascot to life as witty, trend-following, and pop-culture-obsessed – he even has a crush on Dua Lipa.

Much of the language learning app’s TikTok content isn’t related to its services. Instead, the brand is thinking of ways to branch out and connect with new, younger audiences.

#5. Create Engaging Content

As seen with the example of Duolingo, you need knowledge of your audience, combined with a clear brand voice, to create content that speaks to your target market. Delivering that content in a mix of formats such as video, images, audio, infographics, and written content will help you engage your audience in different ways. Having a video strategy in place, for example, is likely to increase engagement, with 81% of consumers enjoying brand videos.

Not only that, but posting content that your audience wants to like, share, and comment on is a big part of social media SEO – the art of optimizing your socials to help visitors find your content. The more engaging your content is, the more engagement you get, the more your brand gets seen!

Unfortunately, making your content engaging is another challenge in itself. While it will change depending on your audience, business, and social platforms, here are some suggestions:

• Ask questions – this will encourage interaction within the comments section and possibly provide helpful feedback
• Run competitions – any form of giveaway will excite your audience. Setting entry requirements like sharing to stories and tagging friends is also the perfect way to boost your visibility

Remember to constantly experiment with different types of content and analyze your customers’ response until you discover which formats your audience enjoys the most.

#6. Work with influencers

Working with influencers in your niche can not only help you grow your reach but can also add an established level of credibility to your content and marketing.

Finding the right influencers may be time consuming, since there’s a lot to consider:

• Past collaborations – previous work with brands in your niche is a great indicator that an influencer could be suitable for your business
• The size of the influencer — micro, macro, nano, and mega influencers will deliver different results for your brand. Larger influencers will get your content a wider audience, but smaller ones often have a closer relationship with their followers.
• Your budget – influencers with large followings will have higher influencer rates.

When searching for influencers, they should align not only with your brand, but also your target market. Strive to work with influencers that fit into your audience’s key demographics, like age, gender, and location. If they have the same interests and pain points as your audience then even better – their following will be a goldmine of like minded individuals who fit into your target audience too!

For example, if you’re reselling affordable surplus coffee pods, a college student influencer that posts about sustainability would be a great fit. Chances are, a lot of their followers may be environmentally aware students looking for affordable deals.

Plus, it will be immediately obvious that an influencer feels passionate about your product and the quality of the content.

#7. Engage and Respond

Don’t forget the “social” part of social media!

Your social media platforms shouldn’t be all about broadcasting – they should be about building a community and a buzz around your brand, products, and services. To do this, you must engage with your audience and respond to their questions and comments regularly.

Different social media platforms allow you to engage with your audience in multiple ways. Here are some of the most common for each platform:

• TikTok – live streams, stitches (incorporating other creators’ content into your videos), and replying to comments with videos
• Instagram – Q&As, polls, live streams, competitions, and broadcast channels (sending one-way direct messages to groups of followers)
• YouTube – asking questions users can answer in the comments and in the Community Hub

#8. Keep Up With Trends

Staying up to date with the latest trends will help you keep your audience engaged, and also satisfy the algorithm of the social media platform you’re using.

It can be helpful to develop a social media content calendar to plot and stay on track with key dates that are important or of interest to your audience. You can also spend time digesting content from influencers and other brands in your niche to see what content is popular.

#9. Analyze and Optimize

If you want to understand how to use social media for business, analyzing your social media performance can help you find areas to optimize and improve.

Some social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, have built-in analytical tools for those that use business profiles. However, for a deeper level of analytics, you may want to invest in third-party tools such as Social Sprout.

You can use these tools to identify key performance areas such as reach, engagement, click-through rates, and conversions. These insights can help you see what’s working and what isn’t, helping to inform decisions on how to progress with your social media strategy.

Read our interview with Revelation Organizing to find out how this business uses social media to connect with clients.

With over half the world’s population (63.7%) now using it, it’s clear that social media is a powerful tool when it comes to growing your online presence. Social media marketing will allow you to:

• Control who sees your brand – targeted ads, hashtags, and relevant keywords will allow you to push your ads to the right audiences
• Spend little or no money – while you can use paid ads, social media is an effective type of free advertising that will let you shout about your business
• Reach global audiences – geographical limits don’t apply to social media in the same way as physical advertising, so it’s easier (and cheaper!) than ever to reach international users
• Grow your business rapidly – by following algorithms and keeping up to date, you can rapidly grow your follower base and potential sales

In this guide, I’ve walked you through everything you need to know about how to grow your business on social media. The most important takeaway is that you need to keep your target audience at the forefront of everything you do. Once you have a clear picture of who they are, use that to shape your brand voice, choose your social media platforms, refine the type of content you post, and choose which influencers to collaborate with.

A final tip to remember with all social media is this: consistency is key if you want to make money on social media. Create a content strategy and schedule regular posts on each platform of your choice. If you follow the above steps, you should be able to see some serious growth on social media!