Reaching the right people on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram is one of the most important considerations when reviewing your social media marketing activities. By taking a quick look at your platforms’ own free-to-use tools, you could be well on your way to achieving social media success. But first, you need to make sure that you increase your user-base and maintain a balanced follower to following ratio.
- Balancing those Follower: Following Ratios
Nobody likes to follow the profile that follows 500 people and only has 50 followers, that has spam written all over it. But we all have to start somewhere, right?
Firstly, adopt a strategy that helps you grow your account gradually without out-balancing the follower to following ratio. This gradual transition from following many people to being followed by many people helps build your account’s credibility and authority. People tend to follow accounts that have a higher Twitter follower to following ratio than the other way round. Even if you have 100 followers and following 10 people, it speaks a lot about the popularity of your account. You need to scale down your followed accounts because as the numbers rise, it becomes difficult to keep up with all that’s happening on your timeline. That’s why Justin Timberlake has 56.6 million Twitter followers, yet only follows 145 accounts. We would heavily recommend Hootsuite, the most widely used platform for managing social media, one which we at HYPE use regularly. As you can see from the image below, the ‘Contacts’ tab on the left hand side allows you to see who’s following you and who you’re following. In order to balance your follower : following ratio, it is important to stay abreast of your followed accounts and regularly cut down this number. These accounts that aren’t following you back can be found in the ‘People I Follow’ section. This will de-clutter your feed and balance your ratio, building your brand integrity.
- Know your facts
Be known to many business Twitter and Facebook accounts, there are great free tools to get to know your audience…so use them! Both Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics give you easy access to all kinds of useful information. They allow you to segment your audience by gender, age and location, to name but a few. This is vital when aiming marketing activities at targeted audiences, because your actual market may be very different to your assumed one.
- Know their interests
Knowing what your audience is actually interested in is half the battle, and the various analytics platforms can give you a good indication of this. Twitter Analytics, in particular, can be great at identifying the key interests of your followers. This is excellent for planning posts and potential incentives that will be of interest to your followers, increasing engagement with the post and the brand. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with adverts, resulting in cluttered social media news feeds. Therefore, breaking through the clutter with more a more targeted approach is key.
- Know your timings
Knowing the “peak timings” for your following has become an obsession amongst many users, particularly with Instagram posts. Fortunately for businesses, you have the power to find this out! Although this is not yet available for Instagram, Facebook Insights allows you to find out when is the best time is to engage with your audience, which is a very useful insight for scheduling posts. This is because it means that we’re much more likely to be visible to our community; which is the first step in generating positive engagement. The graph below shows when your audience is generally online, although this can vary business to business.
So there you go, the four steps in becoming a social media whizz to increase positive engagement with your customers!