This is blog #2 in the series ‘Demystifying digital marketing’
In my previous blog, we delved into the need to build your digital presence. Once the website is up & the social media channels are setup, a common observation is that the focus shifts to content & posting. Hold on! It’s crucial to also build your audience base, if you have not already done so.
Many small and medium-sized business owners are often heard stating, “We post daily on social media” or “My cousin sister manages my page. She writes well.” and so on. The satisfaction comes from the fact that frequent posts are happening. When probed on how many followers the facebook page has, one often gets to hear a small number. Most seem unaware of the fact that a smaller subset of these followers is getting to view the post, and an even smaller sub subset will interact with the post? (How to improve the numbers is a different topic and will be handled separately.)
Let us look at an offline parallel. Imagine a large auditorium that has a seating capacity of 1 lakh people. A 100-piece orchestra is all set to play. The lights are switched off. 100 musicians play brilliant music. They play with passion and grandiosity, in complete sync. They play a brilliant piece. There is applause but very faint. The auditorium lights are switched on. The musicians are aghast. There are only 5 people seated in the auditorium. Is it their fault? Obviously not! They performed brilliantly. So, whose fault is it?
Come back to the online world. Just like these musicians played wonderfully, there maybe nothing wrong with the content you are posting. It maybe brilliant. But are you reaching enough audiences is the question.
It’s important to shift the focus to strategy from tactics. And strategy starts with optimization of your social profiles.
Some easy-to-follow tips to optimize your profiles are:
1. Make sure you have a good profile picture & cover page. Pay attention to dimensions of the images you’re using, you could end up with unpleasant cropping or distorting.
2. Fill in your information completely
3. Customise the URL to include your business or brand name.
4. Include keywords about your products and services
5. Interconnect and integrate your Marketing and Social media channels. Not just on your website, but incorporate social sharing and follow buttons into your emails and thank you pages.
(This is not an exhaustive list since this series is more focused on the ‘what’ & ‘why’ rather than on the ‘how’.)
Summarising simply, “optimization” means making effective use of social media content through strategy and constant improvement.
Next in the series “Social Media Advertising: Can you do without it?”.