Harnessing Social Media for Success: An Atlanta Perspective
According to Demand Sage, there are currently close to 5 billion social media users! Quite a number, isn’t it? People on social media connect with family members, friends, and colleagues. Moreover, they make new friends and find work opportunities as well. All in all, on a personal level, social media has had a significant impact.
But are you aware of social media’s significance as a business-friendly potential hub? The word impact is an understatement to describe the level of change social media has brought to businesses. Today, over 91.9% of businesses are on major social networking platforms.
The potential of social media for businesses is immense since the proper use of it can make or break your business, especially in Atlanta, Georgia, which is considered one of the best and most thriving business locations in the United States. To beat the fierce competition and stand out of the crowd, you need to harness the power of social media to your advantage.
In this post, we will shed light on the significance of social media for customers, especially businesses in Atlanta that can benefit from the opportunities social media has laid out for them on a silver platter. We will discuss the various components of social media and how they can fit as the perfect puzzle pieces in your media marketing strategy.
How to Harness the Power of Social Media
As stated earlier, 91.9% of companies today are active on social media. But what does it take to effectively use social media to advance your brand and business?
Simply showing up on social media is insufficient in today’s cutthroat competition. Every player is out there to compete with you and scoop your share of the target market onto their plates. Moreover, social media users are bombarded with tons of information online. Did you know that more than 300 million Instagram posts are posted daily? Utilize social media effectively if you want to become the talk of the town.
Harnessing the power of social media includes implementing the right strategies and using the right social media tools to make those implementations successful. A business in Atlanta needs to execute specially tailored social media strategies that align with its end goals.
Establishing Clear Social Media Goals
As a business, what you want to achieve has always been the first step when creating strategies. The same goes for social media. Every person uses social networking sites to fulfill a purpose. Many use it to make new friends and post updates about their lives (Facebook); some use it to connect with influencers and see their content (YouTube), while some use it to hunt jobs (LinkedIn).
Here are some of the popular goals that businesses aim to achieve through social media:
Creating Brand Awareness
A small business needs followers to gain traction and start the ball rolling. Brand awareness makes your company’s offerings and your target customers seem familiar and connected. If you are new to the market and want your brand to be heard, your main goal should be making users aware of your business.
There is immense importance of branding for businesses in Atlanta because of the level of competition and the overall business landscape. Customers tend to rely on brands they trust in a city as diverse as Atlanta, where people have numerous options. Moreover, the city is known for its rich culture, which allows local businesses to leverage this heritage through branding to create a sense of belonging and pride among residents.
Maintain Brand Reputation
Once you have the ball rolling, you must keep providing value to your customers and maintain your brand reputation. Trust is an important ingredient of brand reputation that can truly skyrocket the growth of your business since people are mostly inclined toward businesses they trust.
Increase Web Traffic
Social networks are necessary if you are an online business selling your products and services through a website. For example, you run a blog on fitness tips and upload a blog post on your website weekly. A great way to increase the number of visitors that actually read that post is by posting an update on social media. Mostly, all businesses redirect potential customers to their websites through social media, deriving value-laden actions from them.
Increasing Conversions
Increasing web traffic to your platform mostly connects with soaring conversions and sales of your business offering through social media. This is how a business uses social media most of the time. You can set up conversion trackers on your social media platforms directly with your website and monitor the success of your campaigns. We will touch on the various performance metrics later in this post.
Generating Leads
Social media is a goldmine for acquiring leads. It is humanly impossible to sell a product to every potential customer. However, having the information of potential customers, such as their email addresses, can allow you to retarget them in future advertisements. Leads can greatly benefit businesses looking to build their email list and send out regular offers and product promotions.
Engaging With Customers
Lastly, one of your social media goals can be to connect with customers and establish a means of delivering customer service. There are times when potential buyers have some questions regarding your offerings. You can use social media to answer their concerns and create deep connections that ultimately establish trust and loyalty.
What’s Your Target Audience Like?
You must identify your ideal customer once the goals are clear and listed. Whom are you trying to serve? Conducting in-depth market research lays down the foundation of who your target market is. Once you know this, you can choose a social media platform your potential customer uses most often. Finally, you can create popular social media strategies to cater to and care for their needs. Businesses in Atlanta, Georgia, create buyer personas to find out what their ideal buyer looks like. This paves the way to create content that ultimately resonates with your target audience.
What Social Media Platforms to Use?
There are a plethora of social media platforms out there, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (X), Tumblr, TikTok (proprietary software), WeChat (freeware), Myspace, and Sina Weibo. A general perspective would be to be available on all social media platforms. But here is why that is a big mistake for a small business.
Running a small to medium business, you should focus on 1-2 social media platforms your target audience mostly uses. Doing a great job on those two social media apps is far better than doing a mediocre job on maximum platforms.
However, this perspective shifts for businesses in Atlanta, which are mostly large-scale and have a team. You should be in maximum places if you have a special digital marketing team that overlooks content creation and other digital needs for maintaining a platform.
Creating Content That Counts!
The attention span of an average user on social media is only 8 seconds! Moreover, so much content is posted on social platforms that your message might get drowned in the competition. This calls for creating valuable, visually appealing, and engaging content.
Various types of content forms can be posted on social media. Examples include posting pictures, videos, polls, infographics, and blog posts on social media. From all these forms, video content takes the lead as one of the best-engaged content on social media sites. Currently, video marketing is being revolutionized with various innovations that further increase its impact on user engagement.
Consistency Is the Key
Maintaining consistency on social networking sites is a must if you want to establish a thriving brand. When a company disappears from social media for even a few days, nobody remembers them. It is just like a passing cloud. A robust media strategy focusing on frequent content posting is crucial since it keeps your brand at the surface levels, allowing active users to engage continually.
A great way to maintain consistency is by creating a calendar for a month’s content you wish to post on your social media. Use tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts throughout the month without worrying about posting manually each time. A social media marketing agency can also create content and seamlessly post it on your social channels.
The Power of Keywords and Hashtags
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects to thrive in the online world. Similar to Google searches, SEO also plays a vital role in crafting the social media strategy for your social media pages. Using the right keywords with healthy competition makes your post appear in users’ search results, ultimately increasing your posts’ engagement.
Hashtags, on the other hand, are also greatly popular among Twitter users and Instagram audiences and can help boost your social media engagement and allow your content to reach a larger audience. Many hashtags have become popular based on current trends. Hence, look out for when a trend emerges over social media that you can cash in.
Leveraging Influencers
Influencers hold the power to change the perception of the masses, mostly of their followers and fans. This opens a great opportunity to leverage influencer marketing to reach a wide base of target customers and expand your business to the next level. Customers of your brand develop a sense of trust and credibility for the goods and services that influencers support.
Selecting influencers that are pertinent to your target market is crucial, though. Conduct detailed market research and learn who your target audience is. Next, you need to identify influencers your audience follows so your offering can reach them. Another important factor is to find influencers whose personalities and values align with your brand’s image. This further strengthens the message of influencers, crystalizing your brand image.
Going a Step Ahead With Social Media Ads
To properly harness the power of social media for your own business in Atlanta, you have to step up your game by running social media ads on your page. Organic traffic is great, but adding a layer of paid social ads exponentially boosts your growth. Moreover, paid ads allow you to select the specific goals you wish to achieve through an ad campaign, such as increasing leads, getting more traffic, or conversions.
Examples of social media platforms that provide a detailed ad format with specific goals include Twitter (X), Facebook, and LinkedIn. One advantage of social media agencies is running social media ad campaigns. Reputed social media agencies design a campaign for your business from scratch, incorporating all aspects of your business goals along with a clear call to action that derives your desired level of results in the end.
Measuring the Success
Now, we know how businesses in Atlanta can harness the power of social media and achieve unimaginable results. However, measuring those results is important to know the success achieved. For example, you can use the following indicators to gauge the effectiveness of your social media channels:
Reach
The basic and widely known metric used to measure social media success is reach. Reach is when a particular social media post reaches a user. An active user might not interact with your post at this point, but it still shows on their feed.
Engagement
Every business aims that their content gets the best level of engagement, which means that people interact with their posts, and actions are driven through them. These actions include viewing the image in detail or liking the post.
Clicks
Clicks are an important key performance indicator. This is when action is taken, and the user gets redirected to your desired destination, such as your website. Various call-to-actions (CTAs) are used to maximize clicks.
Conversions
Finally, the conversion is recorded when a user purchases your product or service. Various conversion trackers, such as Facebook Pixel, can be integrated into your website to keep track of the complete activity of users till they convert.
Conclusion
Social media can be used for various purposes. However, harnessing the power of social media for businesses in Atlanta is the epitome of achieving unbelievable levels of growth. Following simple strategies can make your brand the next big thing.
If you are searching for a social media marketing agency that can completely take ownership of the social media marketing for your business, then Frenik Labs is here to serve you. With tons of experience and success stories, we are ready to give your brand the spotlight it deserves on social media!
