13 Effective Ways to Build a Consistent Social Media Presence
Maintaining an active and consistent presence on social media is crucial for any business nowadays, as that is often its first point of contact with potential customers. Posting quality content and thoughtful comments is a good way to start engaging with your audience, but it’s hardly enough if you want to stand out among a sea of competing businesses.
To expand your reach, grow your visibility, develop stronger relationships and increase your authority, you need to build and maintain a consistent presence on all of your social channels and share quality, engaging content multiple times a day. This will ultimately lead to enhanced brand recognition and higher ROI.
Below, 13 entrepreneurs from YEC share their top tips on how to achieve a consistent social media presence.
1. Try IFTTT
There are many social tools that allow you to automate posts. However, a lot of them require premeditated scheduling. If you do not have the time to create an editorial calendar at the beginning of every month, IFTTT is the tool for you. Create a chain on IFTTT to automatically push your blog posts onto your desired social platforms once they have been published on your site.
2. Schedule Everything
I like to do things on the fly, but social media is not the way to communicate like that. Instead, for me and my team to be consistent, we schedule all social media content. If there are situations when we need to respond to a breaking issue, we will discuss how we can immediately respond and get guidance from all to make sure it reflects our philosophy and core messaging.
3. Complete Your Social Media Schedule in Q1
The beauty of social is that it can be scheduled, so get a year’s worth of content scheduled by the end of Q1. Why? Because then you are free to focus on immediate trends, manage customer support and build out new and focused materials. You will grow your social media presence tenfold with this strategy.
– Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
4. Use Buffer
Buffer is an incredible social media scheduling tool. You can schedule posts for all of your platforms, customize for each and shuffle so that all of your newsfeeds are different. It keeps you organized and your posting consistent — you can’t do social media without it.
– Kevin Conner, BroadbandSearch
5. Plan Ahead, But Keep Your Schedule Fluid
As in any area of your business, you need to plan, and plan ahead in advance. However, social media is one area that’s constantly changing by the hour or even minute. Your plan needs to be flexible to allow you to jump into trending topics as necessary. Planning a month ahead simply doesn’t give you proper insight into important social trends that pop up constantly.
6. Make Sure You Have a Social Media Strategy
Automation tools and services can help. Another option is outsourcing. However, what’s most important is to have a coherent social media strategy. Once you identify your goals and the kind of content you want to publish, it’s easier to create and implement a schedule for posting. For example, you may want to curate and comment on a certain type of tech news.
7. Use BuzzSumo
We use BuzzSumo to help us find the best content to share on our social media platforms. You can find out what news is trending in your industry to always be on top of the game. We usually post around 50/50 original content vs. industry news and retweets.
8. Invite Audience Participation
One effective way I’ve found to generate consistent and engaging content is to regularly seek feedback from your followers and subscribers. Something as simple as a weekly opinion poll or a regular column inviting letters to the editor can go a long way toward building a social media presence and improving communication with your audience. This is a successful strategy used by YouTube creators.
9. Use Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar is nice because you just have to load up the posts once and the software recycles through the content as often as you want. I’ve seen a notable increase in my social media traffic and I haven’t manually made a post in months.
10. Build Up a Reservoir
Make a routine, every week or month, of creating a lot of high-quality content ahead of time, then posting it as a slow drip. It’s much easier to post consistently when you have a repository of content to pull from. I have a habit of busting out all my LinkedIn content on Sunday mornings — it’s a time when I can write without distractions and create plenty of ammo for the week.
– Ben Lee, Neon Roots
11. Focus on Only a Few Key Platforms
Focus only on those social media platforms that provide you with good ROI. Some people get distracted by trying to be active on every social media site. This ends up diluting your efforts, as you can only keep up with so many accounts. Use Facebook and Twitter at least and then maybe one or two others with proven value. Set up a schedule for posting and stick with it.
12. Try Facebook Publishing Tools
Although third-party apps such as Buffer are great for scheduling upcoming content, our social media team schedules all Facebook content natively. Publishing directly through Facebook allows you to see what your post will look like when it goes live and gives you clear insights on how each post did, which is great information to use when it comes to creating future content.
13. Hire Freelancers
When it come to blogging consistently, it’s difficult to do it all on your own. Hire some freelancers to write a couple articles a week and post them on social media to stay consistent. Once you’ve developed a reputation for consistency, people will start coming to your blog to see what’s new, and you’ll even start getting some guest blogging inquiries.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
Social media is now more oversaturated then ever before. If you really want to find success, you need to select a niche audience and cater to them as best as possible. It’s no longer a winning formula to just create content and send out as many social updates as possible.
If you enjoyed this expert roundup, I highly recommend you check out another one which asks 83 online marketing experts the question “How Do I Start a Successful Blog?”. If you don’t already have a website or blog of your own, follow my guide to get started with one today.