Instagram Threads A New Trend Taking Social Media by Storm
April 18, 2024
Tired of not getting the likes on your post? Oh wait! Maybe you’re looking for a way to increase your followers on social media.
Yeah! All of us want these two things, right? Especially when we start off our journey on social media.
Churning out the right SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY can help you achieve these two things and much more. It just takes 7 simple steps to start off with.
Saying No? Then check out this article. You’ll also learn how to know what matters to you on social media. Let’s dive in.
Yeah! You’d have read this a zillion times. That’s because it is a good head start. Observe your competitors. Note down patterns and gaps.
Your competitor might be active on Facebook and might be inactive on Twitter. That customer base is all up for the takes.
Google your keywords. See who or what turns up. Check out their website and their social platforms. Take a paper and write down these two things.
The content your competitors are posting
The audience interacting with it.
It helps you decide your own audience persona and the relevant social media platform.
Have a strategy already?
Great. Evaluate it against your competitor’s strategy. Improvise it. It gives you an insight of your current audience demographic.
Each social platform has a personality of its own. Make the most of it.
Think of different social platforms as different social situations. Would you go the same way for a date the way you’d go say for your office meeting? That’d be so weird, right?
Well, that holds for social platforms too. The Twitter birdie is definitely different from the insta-pout Instagram. Pouts are the thing of Instagram. You’d go with a GIF for Twitter.
As a business, you focus on customer and brand interaction keeping all this in mind.
Say you’re a brand that loves videos. Of course, we know YouTube is the king of videos. But hey, what about Instagram or Snapchat.
Well, doesn’t that seem a good fit? It would, provided short videos are your focus. ‘Cos you have reels and stories tailor-made for it.
Choosing a platform also informs you about the kind of content you’d have to present.
Say suppose your demographics help you realize that Instagram is your perfect platform. Now the video content here could be a bit longer. (IG is also planning to increase the length of reels from 30 seconds to a minute.)
And hey, you even have IGTV to go bigger. A Snapchat content would look offbeat on an IGTV format or worse still on LinkedIn.
Yeah! We know we’re going too blah blah and you’re going Meh!
So, here’s a brand that’s used social platforms brilliantly. They’ve let users decide what’s to be posted on their Instagram profile. How’s that? Through User Generated-Content.
And, which brand are we talking of? It’s Cupshe. Their bio also adds to the nature of their content. It reads, “Tag @cupshe and use #cupshe to be featured”
Many other brands use Twitter to address customer pain points. It has helped them reduce calls to customer care.
Documentation is vital for social media strategy. It helps you reflect and asses your activities.
You could use a simple worksheet template. Note down your key performance indicators and your goals. Enter all the metrics into it at least once a day.
Over a couple of weeks, you’ll notice patterns.
Your content might be performing well because of hashtags. Maybe people love a particular content format that they end up sharing it with their network.
Note it all down so that you get an idea about what type of content works for you. Optimize your efforts based on these parameters.
Your business definitely needs this. Having a business account helps you with this. They are packed with insight generating tools.
Back your campaign strategy with this data. Start it small. This way you could implement immediate changes, if any.
Having a master social document also gives you insights into which platforms work the best for you and which don’t.
You could also include details like who you want to collaborate with, people responsible for posting and communication.
The document must also have the list of audience that interact actively, moderately, and passively with your brand.
This helps you develop a strong and active community, and saves a lot of time.
Humans are hardwired for habits. It makes things easier.
Habituating your audience to a specific time of the day for the post makes it easier for them to know when to expect your post. This is true for any social platform.
For instance, we post on Instagram at 6 PM Monday to Saturday. If you have a special event or a post planned, you could post it at a different time once in a while.
Knowing your audience boosts your business.
One of the easiest ways to know your audience is to interview them. Use social channels like LinkedIn or Instagram and talk to your most valuable customer.
In case you aren’t able to interview your audience, send in review forms. Ask them what they like about your brand or service.
This not only gives you an insight into your audience trigger points but also helps you build your brand persona.
Your ultimate goal must be to build a community on platforms your audience are most active. Communities make audience feel at home and they tend to ease with you and your brand.
Make sure you respond to the queries and concerns of your audience once the community is built.
For instance, we get messages about digital marketing workshops. Yeah, we love imparting what we know. So, we ensure that whenever we get queries regarding workshops on our social platform, we respond to it as quickly as possible.
Have you DM’d your network? No? Then we have a tip for you.
Whenever you sit down to plan your social media calendar, make sure that you allocate the time to interact and engage with your audience.
Start interacting with your audience, especially after you post on your social profiles.
If you have no clue whatsoever of who your audience are, do not worry – all of us have been there. You can grow meaningfully out of it. Try this simple thing out.
Take a pen and paper and note down the list of your customers over the top of your mind. Go ahead do it now.
Once you’ve done that note down patterns. Maybe they are all of a similar age group, from the same location, have same income, or express similar interests or hobbies.
Clarity is a game changer.
Understand what matters to you. It powers up your social media strategy.
Your business goals and data are the go-to pair. Your strategy must firmly be rooted in both of these.
Account insights is your holy grail to start with. See! That’s why it is important to own a business profile for your social media. Post insights, give you an idea of how your audience interact with the post.
Plotting the insight data for a month might help you understand your current reality and the goal you want to achieve.
If you have not been able to achieve your business goal, iterate your strategy to meet the goal. Ask yourselves this one simple question.
What would give you the sense of accomplishment? You could break it down to get to the specifics.
Each intention has its own effect.
If there are people visiting your social profile and are following you through, congrats! You’re building yourself a solid community.
If people are visiting your website from the social media page, then ‘woohoo!’ you’re directing amazing traffic to your website.
If on the other hand, you see your customers interacting with you and your posts, then you’re building a personal relationship with your customers.
Any of the three could be your key performance indicators (KPI). If you wish to educate your audience about the brand or the product, you could consider directing them to your blog too.
Remember these three letters K.P.I. Key Performance Indicators, it matters.
To begin with, get active on one social media platform. It helps you focus.
In addition, it helps you decide the content tone, as a brand. As you expand it gets easier to maintain uniformity of tone across channels.
Your content strategy for social media must be uniform. As you saw in the previous section, numbers inform your social strategy but content rules your social media success.
Pause for a while and check. Is your ad copy consistent with your emailer? Or is your tone consistent with the one you’ve used say on Twitter.
Basically, would your people still know it’s you, even without your logo? Although this is idealistic, this should be your guiding north star for the tone.
Take a look at this post for example. It has a casual tone with a tinge of humour. We mean, humor keeps us going.
Here’s another post which is a bit different. We love to get the creative juice flowing too.
All of this sounds great, isn’t it? Although it seems overwhelming, it is something that’s doable over a period of time. Consistency is your best friend here.
Okay, now comes the obvious question, right?
Well, the answer is both a yes and a no. Confused? Let’s simplify it.
If you’re starting out as a brand, you could do it all by yourself. However, as your business grows, you might want to be more strategic and intentional.
That is where an agency helps you. An agency has dedicated teams taking care of both the strategy and execution.
At Innovkraft we develop social media calendars and stick by it. This helps you stay up to date with the status quo of your social media channels even amidst your busy schedule.
We also analyse the best-performing posts and boost them so that your brand gets the most exposure.
If you feel, “Yeah social media is important for my business…” We consider our job done.
Also, we get you, it is natural to have doubts. So, if there are any queries or you require any service regarding social media marketing, feel free to reach out to us
