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WHERE BUSINESSES GO TO GROW

The 3 Key Steps to a Winning Social Media Strategy

Social media is often treated like a mysterious, dark art. If you don’t understand all the complexities of algorithms and audience building, then you’ve got no chance at success, right? That’s actually not the case. Even now, social media is still primarily about three key factors, and if you keep these in mind as you move forward, you can build a strategy that not only gets you loyal followers, but more importantly loyal customers.

1. Be open, genuine, and helpful. There’s a lot of gatekeeping that goes on with brands not wanting to discuss how they do things, or being very selective about only publishing content that shows a perfectly polished image, but all this does is feed into mistrust and alienate a potential audience. Social media users are savvy to all the slick tricks, filters, and concealment – what they want is authenticity, openness, and businesses that are truly in the game to help their customers out. If you have expert knowledge, share it. If entertaining things happen behind the scenes that show you to be imperfectly human, show those too. Be willing to help, and willing to communicate freely.

2. Prioritize real leads over social stats. Likes and follows on a social platform are incredibly enticing, it’s satisfying to watch the numbers and the likes go up, but how many of those viewers and followers are actually bringing money in for your business? The more practical, “boring” posts that help people solve a problem usually don’t get as much attention, but they can often be the ones that lead to more clickthroughs and lead conversions, which is what your business actually needs. Stay focused on the real goal – casual social followers may come and go, but don’t get hung up on those numbers. Instead, keep track of which posts are actually creating leads for your business, and create more content like that interspersed with your fun, light content.

3. Don’t drop the ball. This seems so obvious, and yet it’s the number one way that small businesses fail in their social strategy. You start out with every intention of posting daily, and you manage it for a couple of weeks or even a month, but then life gets in the way and you think it doesn’t matter if you skip a day. Then maybe you’re skipping two days, or a whole week. Once you’ve set that precedent for social media being the thing that goes out the window first when life gets busy, it’s hard to get that back on track, and that’s how you lose an audience. Make a social calendar, plan out your posts in advance so that you don’t have to waste time every day trying to think of what to post, and then be diligent about following the calendar. Consistency is essential, both for appeasing the algorithms and attracting customers.

Social media is an important factor in any digital marketing strategy, but of course it’s only one piece of the puzzle. If you have questions about any aspect of your marketing, contact us for a free consultation so we can give you honest feedback and personalized tips to get you moving in the right direction.

COGO Interactive is an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing strategy, web design, SEO and social media marketing. We work with clients in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC and across the nation.

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