The past year has seen an accelerated increase in e-commerce and with it a rise in social media use as a primary means of building and connecting with ideal customers.
Put simply, social media is no longer an option. If you want to sustain your business presence online and generate more leads and more sales, you need a viable social media strategy. Although there are more active social media users than ever before, there’s also more fierce competition from other businesses, so you need to make sure your brand will stand out and attract a following.
In today’s social media landscape, it’s not enough to merely claim your business handles, create a profile, and post some professional photos every once in a while. In order to succeed, you need planning, research, and direction if you’re going to make an impact on social.
If you’re wondering how to start, here’s a brief overview of 3 crucial shifts you’ll want to make in your social media strategy to make sure you’re in alignment with what’s working today:
1. Make Sure Your Online Listings Complete & Information Rich
Google My Business (GMB) is more important than ever to the success of your business’s online presence in 2021. If customers are looking for information about your company, more than likely the very first they will do is Google your business name.
If you’re a local business, a completed GMB listing can be the key factor in improving your SEO ranking among other businesses in your area. Even 100% online businesses want to make sure you’ll show up for relevant searches. Google has added an increasing number of options to GMB, such as analytics tools and the ability to add short blog posts, to help your business track and promote visibility with your target audience. Check out this comprehensive guide to make sure your GMB listing is optimized.
Your Google listing is the cornerstone upon which to construct your social media empire. Most businesses find it useful to concentrate their efforts on a few social platforms where they’re most likely to engage with their ideal audience. Whichever platforms you choose, you want to make sure you incorporating keywords and keeping up to date on all profile and background header requirements. Here is a list of the current dimensions for visual media for all the major platform so you can ensure your profile will look fresh and professional across all devices.
2. Research Your Best-Performing Competitors 
Online you can find all sorts of advice on what, when, and how to post on social media – but most of these guidelines are developed according to broad trends and may actually not be relevant to your business niche. This is why the best strategy is to research your most competitors to gauge what’s currently working to attract your target market.
There are several tools you can use to create benchmark data reports on your competitors so you can compare likes, views, content topics, keywords, hashtags, engagement rates, and more in order to plan your own strategy. Some of these tools include BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, SEMrush, CrowdTangle, Sprout Social among so many that keep popping up in the space – do you have a favorite?
3. Hone in on Unique Trends in Content
You also want to pay attention to the broader key trends in content so you can determine topics, keywords, and hashtags for your social media that go beyond what your competitors are doing. This way you can connect with your ideal audience while standing out.
Monitoring data trends can be useful to find new opportunities. Google Trends is a major resource, but social media platforms such as Pinterest and Snapchat have their own tools for trends that might give you more uncommon insight. You might also want to try tools such as Answer the Public that uses insights from a variety of search engines including Google to show you related searches for any term.
Ready to make the most of your social media marketing efforts? Schedule a quick call with someone from our team here at JXT Group for some customized recommendations. Just call 718-690-7302 or submit our quick and easy online contact form.
