A solid social media strategy has become an essential in modern business. In short, your strategy defines how your business will use social media to achieve its aims - this includes which platforms you'll use, your measurable objectives for success and much more.
You may think that your current social media strategy has been working just fine for you, and that there’s no need to change or update it. But social media changes quickly, and so too should your approach be updated in-step.
Here are six newer elements you should consider adding to your strategy, in order to take your social media game to the next level:
1. Add a Messenger chatbot to your Facebook Page
A Messenger chatbot can be a great way to keep in touch with your audience on an individual level. You can personalize the messages you send out to people who've opted in to receive content from you, alerting them to special offers, or new content on your site.
Chatbots can also make customer service much easier and faster, responding to your customers’ queries 24-hours a day. This can help to build a better relationship with your customers, which can only be good in the long-term.
You can even use chatbots to provide receipts, dispatch confirmations and to provide product suggestions.
2. Add a video cover image to your Facebook Page
The cover photo of your Facebook Page is one of the first things new visitors will see - in fact, they may well see it before your profile picture. Given this, it's important then to make an impact, and a video cover image is the way to do just that.
Take a look at National Geographic’s Facebook Page, or Australia.com’s for some inspiration.
3. Use more video across all platforms - especially live video
Video content is so important these days, especially with videos playing automatically in the Facebook News Feed.
You also have the ability to go live on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Try to think of ways you can use this to your advantage, and create great, engaging content for your followers.
All the experts are predicting that video will continue to grow in popularity, so it’s definitely worth investing some time and effort to incorporate it into your social marketing strategy.
4. Invest in paid ads
With Facebook constantly changing its algorithm, and with Twitter and Instagram now also using their own algorithm-defined systems to sort user feeds, organic reach across all platforms is getting lower and lower.
While you should always ensure that you’re sharing high-quality, valuable content as a priority, even a small investment in an ad campaign can pay significant dividends, especially on Facebook, where you’re really able to target your content to the right people.
5. Use stories
This is a function that began on Snapchat, but has since spread to Facebook and Instagram.
And it’s only getting bigger - over 300 million people now use Instagram Stories each month and Facebook continues to push Facebook Stories, alongside Snapchat. With constant additions and developments, social stories are bound to increase in popularity.
Stories are a great way to reach your audience in real time, and because of the immediacy of Stories, you don’t necessarily need to produce super high-quality, curated content, like you normally would on your profile. Instead, you can use it as an informal way of showing a glimpse behind the scenes of your business.
Have fun with the different Lenses and filters and run polls or ask questions. Research shows that this sort of content (which only lasts 24 hours before being deleted) is very popular with younger millennials and Generation Z. It's also considered to be more authentic than sponsored ads, or other content. Worth using this to your advantage.
6. Repurpose your content
If you’ve created a live video on a particular topic, upload it to other social media channels, and also transcribe it and turn it into a blog post.
Take quotes from the video and make them into quote cards to share on social media, or splice together videos from your Instagram or Snapchat Stories, and post the collection on your Facebook Page or YouTube.
This is a great way of getting more mileage from one piece of content, and also of making sure your messaging is consistent across all platforms - take a look at Lilach Bullock’s article “5 Ways to Repurpose Your Top Social Media Posts and Updates” for further inspiration.
As noted, social media is always changing, and there are always new tools and options on offer to enhance your messaging. It's worth staying across all the latest developments, and utilizing them where possible to ensure you're maximizing your effiorts.