5 Steps to Kickstart Your Brand’s Social Media

Social media marketing is pivotal to the success of your brand in today’s competitive business world. Just about everyone is on at least one social media platform and it acts as one of the best ways for consumers to engage with brands.

So what do you do if you aren’t on social media yet? How do you go about it the right way? We wanted to highlight our 5 tips to kickstart your brand’s social media.

Define Your Starting Place

Before you even start building your social media presence, you first want to decide what social platforms you will start with, and what your goal is for each.  In order to make the right choice, you first need to determine who your audience is, and where that audience goes to engage in the content. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are common, but also consider LinkedIn, YouTube or Pinterest as well. 

The channels you decide to focus on will ultimately shape the rest of your planning. You can still expand to additional platforms as your brand goes, and cross-posting will help build your channels as long as the content is relevant to each channel.

Research Your Platforms

Now that you have chosen the platforms to start with, you should now do some research to determine the following:

• Best practices for post timing and frequency
• Platform-specific content recommendations
• Competitors on the platform

The information above will give you a good idea as to how you want to layout your social media calendar in terms of timing and frequency, what types of content you should be creating, and an idea of what your competitors are doing on the platform to give you insights as well.

Plan Your Content

Now with some research insights on-hand, you can start to create a social media content calendar. Planning your content will allow you to ensure you are posting at the optimal time, with a good mix of relevant content. Planning allows you to capitalize on holidays and trends while still having some flexibility to adjust content as needed.

Creating your first content calendar will be difficult as don’t have any past data to build on, so don’t worry about getting it perfect right away.

Review Your Progress

While industry and competitor insights help you craft your strategy, reviewing and reporting on your own progress and is going to be pivotal to the success of your brand’s presence on social media. This review should be done at least every 30 days, but you may want to review it more often in the beginning.

A few things to consider when reviewing past content:

• What were your most/least popular posts and why?
• Which days/times are your posts getting the most engagement?
• How are you progressing through your metrics? (Impressions, Engagement Rate, Likes/Followers)
• What your audience is saying

When starting out you may not have too much to work with but the information is still important to help refine your strategy.

Keep it Fresh

Another thing you want to keep in mind as you develop ongoing content calendars is to keep your content fresh. Simply posting images, or links with copy, every day will start to become boring for your audience. Not only will you want to be utilizing a wide range of content for your channels, but you may also want to develop specific campaigns or contests that can help you achieve your goal.

The ultimate goal of social media is to open up a channel that your audience can engage with you on. Show that you are listening to what they want and tailoring content to fill that need. This can be done in a variety of ways depending on your brand.

These are just a few of the steps you can follow to kickstart your brand’s social media presence but it often takes months (or even years) to get it to where you want, and continued efforts to keep it that way.