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In a world filled with automation, likes and mindless scrolling, it’s easy to lose yourself in the digital tidal wave of social media content.
As the years have progressed, social media has become more widely utilized by online and brick-and-mortar businesses alike to reach their customers. There are 3.2 billion active social media users in the world, or roughly 42% of the population. Numbers like those may make it seem impossible to pick out the individuals who would be interested in your business, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. Here are three tips that can help your business stand out from the competition and bring in new customers.

Let your voice be heard

Having your own brand voice as a business is one of the most important things you can do. The tone you portray on social media can be a make or break for some consumers. Use that to your advantage. It never hurts to be personable with your followers. Consumers like to see a personal touch from the brands they follow. A good example of this is the Wendy’s Restaurants Twitter account. Even a national brand like Wendy’s will interact with its followers, giving a relaxed feel to their page. It’s important to note though that there is a line between being casual and being unprofessional.

The importance of proper branding

Proper branding can bring your social media presence to the next level. Shake Shack is a company that does a great job of this with their Instagram account. When you visit their profile, you see simple logos atop their page for the profile picture and story highlights. Keeping a consistent color scheme and design style helps followers to associate those images with the ShakeShack brand. With time, consumers get to know the simple burger graphic used in the profile picture as Shake Shack. A name is no longer needed in branding at this level. Continuing down through Shake Shack’s Instagram feed you can see a consistent pattern of bright colors, interesting backgrounds and hands holding their burgers and sandwiches. Can’t you just envision yourself holding one of those?

Another tool to employ is your own personal hashtag. This hashtag can help your previous customers connect with you, whether it is while they are in your business, or wearing/using a product you sold them in the past. Researching before jumping into your post schedule is also very important. Take the time to look into which hashtags are trending at that current time and which designs are in. A good example of this is the summer 2019 trend of featuring bright colors and patterns. Doing this research will keep you up to date and show your followers you know what’s hot. The consistency of posting on your account helps to bring it all together, and conveniently, that is number three on the list.

Staying consistent

It’s great to find your own voice as a business and then be able to combine that with effective branding, but that would all be for nothing if it is not seen by your followers. Consistent posts help to keep your followers engaged as well as draw new followers in. One of the most common reasons businesses fall short of this is the time commitment involved. Posting and managing social media accounts can suck up valuable time you need to run your business, especially if you do not have a marketing team or agency to help handle this. One of the best ways to combat this is to develop a monthly schedule of posts. This will eliminate gaps in posting on your feed without having to set aside a large amount of time each day. For a platform like Facebook, try to post once a day or at least four times per week. In comparison, a platform like Instagram demands a different plan. Try to post at least three traditional posts per week as well as three stories. This combination will help you post consistent content without spending the time on six traditional posts. Stagger the stories and posts on different days so you don’t over-saturate your followers with content and then disappear for multiple days.

An important note to remember is to avoid posting lower quality content just because you have to. Stay consistent with your brand and voice. Even if you have nothing to post on a certain day something as simple as an Instagram or Facebook story can help your followers stay engaged with your brand, which is so important in the competitive world of social media and marketing.

While successfully managing social media accounts can seem daunting, we hope these quick tips will help break it down into bite-size tasks.