“Content is fire. Social media is gasoline” -Jay Baer.
From being a student trend in Harvard to becoming a worldwide phenomenon, Facebook along with other social media platforms have slowly crept into our lives and brought a landmark change in how we live and do business.
From reading the latest news to interacting with your friends, social media is everywhere. With 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of baby boomers active on social media, these platforms are robust, and brands that don’t capitalize on these marketing platforms are the ones that fall prey to digital Darwinism.
For most brands, presence, and marketing on social media is a part of their survival toolkit. From increasing brand awareness, generating more leads to growing a larger audience base, and increasing web traffic – social media is a go-getter and a vital component of your overall marketing strategy.
That’s why you should leave no stone unturned when it comes to expanding your social media presence.
5 Smart Ways to Expand Your Social Media Presence in 2021
With the whirlwind last year, anticipating what lies ahead is like finding a needle in the haystack. Therefore, focus on these five smart ways to expand your social media presence and connect with your target audience in the post-COVID world.
1. Use voice recognition technology
Social media and content go together like pasta and garlic bread. Your customers may find your work delicious and worthy of sharing if you’re continually sharing informative and useful content.
For example, you create videos about your business and post them on your YouTube channel and Facebook page. Using a Facebook PPC campaign, your video reaches thousands of views, and the viral tide ends.
In a never-ending quest to see a million views, you overlook people with hearing impairment and those with a slow internet connection.
That’s why you need to add transcripts below every video you share on social media.
For converting your audio to text, use an audio to text translator. These translators are fast, accurate, and use voice recognition technology for translation.
Benefits of using a voice recognition technology
- Transcripts make your page more parsable and searchable.
- Transcripts increase social shares as audio or video files are social media snippets compatible.
- Help in ranking for relevant keywords.
- Allow repurposing content for your blog or social media post.
- Ease the content creation process. For example, transcripts of webinars or live sessions on Facebook can be used to create support documents, white papers, blogs, and even infographics, which you can share on your social media handles.
Interesting fact: According to research, pages with transcripts earn 16% more revenue than those without a transcript. Use Happy Scribe to turn audio into text accurately.
2. Focus on user-generated content (UGC)
With 89% of Millennials trusting recommendations from friends, peers, and family members more than claims by a brand – UGC has never been more critical to social media than today.
In 2021, UGC is likely to become the most popular choice for brands looking to expand their social media presence. For Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, user-generated content is a modern-day digital word-of-mouth.
User-generated content or user-created content includes imagery, audio, video, or text posted by customers on different social media platforms. It could be a selfie that a patient shares after recovering or testimonials of customer experience with your brand.
Your customer has done their part by sharing their genuine experience with your brand. Now, it’s your turn to leverage it by reposting, publicizing, and sharing it with as many people as possible.
With brands receiving 26% more traffic on sharing customer reviews on Twitter – UGC could be the social media game-changer your brand has been looking for.
Benefits of user-generated content
- Help trigger dialogues between a customer and your brand
- Increases traffic, conversions, and engagements
- Provides your brand with the much-needed social proof
- Streamlines lead nurturing
- Boost your social media metrics
Interesting fact: Did you know that 25% of the search result of the world’s 20 biggest brands linked to UGC? With this in mind, you don’t have an option other than giving UGC priority in 2021.
3. Know the nuts and bolts of social commerce
Welcome to 2021, a year in which ecommerce is the center stage of social media. That’s the world of social commerce. Confused?
Social commerce brings the functionality of ecommerce directly into social media platforms.
From the launch of Instagram reel shopping to the TikTok-Shopify partnership, your customers will likely get comfortable buying from social platforms in the coming year.
With 25% of brands selling through Facebook and 40% using social media to sell, we’re progressing towards the era of social commerce or social shopping.
Benefits of social commerce
- Consistent growth in audience
- Increases engagement and traffic
- Builds loyalty and trust
- Increases social shares
- Enhances SEO performance
- Increases repeat purchases
Interesting fact: The pandemic taught us to remain indoors, which brought a landmark change in the way a customer shops. Even with memories of 2020 far behind, online shopping is likely to increase. With 30% of online shoppers are likely to purchase through social media – you cannot overlook social shopping power.
4. Give importance to social media listening.
How many times has your grandmother or father interrupted you by saying, “Listen before you speak?”
It’s something we’ve heard while growing up.
The same holds for brands on social media. Active listening and thoughtful communication are two pillars that decide your brand’s failure and success on social media. Many out of the 3.96 billion active social media users may be commenting and saying things about your brand. With so many users, the social noise easily gets lost, and you’re unable to make sense from your data.
That’s where social listening comes into the picture.
If you don’t listen to your audience, you cannot connect and influence them. Social listening is about understanding and analyzing brand-specific data such as brand mentions. You can leverage this analysis to build and expand your social media presence in 2021.
Benefits of social media listening
- Help identify sales leads
- Help understand what customers want
- Helps in responding to customer complaints
- Finds user-generated content
- Connects with brand advocates and influencers
Interesting facts: Social media listening looks at the mood and reason behind the data. Use tools like Awario for social listening and analytics.
5. Take the meme culture seriously
For most social media users, memes are a stress buster, which helped pass the lockdown phase with ease. Apart from providing entertainment and bringing a smile to your customer’s faces, you can leverage the meme culture to grow and boost your engagement rate.
Memes are fun-stories, jokes, short-video or statements that are widely shared and reposted on social media. What makes memes unique is that they go beyond the ‘see, laugh, and move on’ phenomenon. Memes can go viral, and with a meme, your brand name or message also goes viral.
But it’s easier said than done.
Not all memes go viral. Creating an original meme for social media takes time but is worthy of every effort. Ensure that a meme that you create is in-line with your branding and company in some way.
With 38% of people following meme accounts on social media platforms, it could help you compellingly connect with your target audience.
Benefits of meme culture
- Makes presentation of complex concepts simple
- Cost-effective
- Increases likes, followers, and social shares
- Increases customer engagement and traffic
- Help in targeting a particular audience
- Delivers the brand message in an impactful manner
Interesting fact: Today, meme is a culture, which is less likely to fade away in the future. As a brand, leverage it to your benefits and expand your social media presence.
Wrapping up
For digital customers, social media is likely to take greater significance in 2021. The unprecedented turn of events in 2020 forced a shift to digital communication, making many social media strategies outdated and giving rise to new ones.
There is no magic wand that you can swish and flick to expand your social media presence. Instead, there are strategies that you can focus on to build social media accounts focusing on customer engagement above everything else. Brands can no longer overlook engaged users’ power as you may have an online community with thousands of followers who never read or interact with your post.
The key to expanding your social media presence lies with customers who actively engage with your brand, share content, and ultimately become paying customers.
Just like Rome, this cannot be built in a single day. Building a social media presence requires effort, but the results are difficult to ignore.
Use these five smart ways to grow your social media presence in 2021.
Just remember that social media was built to converse with others. Keep your strategy in-line with this concept to expand your presence.
How do you plan to increase your social media presence in 2021?
Do let us know in the comments section!
