Social media is an important marketing tool to help get you in front of your potential customers. Whether you’re promoting products or services, educating your audience about why you’re the best, or simply sharing what you’re up to, social media platforms are a great outlet to help customers engage with your brand. With Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more, we’re talking about some of our best tips and tricks to help you decide what might work best for you.

Make a Plan

• Set Your Social Media Goals and Objectives – It’s important to go beyond metrics such as likes and retweets and also focus on factors such as leads generated.
• Improve your Existing Accounts – If you already have existing social accounts, make sure they’re updated to reflect your brand values.
• Find Relevant Industry Leaders – Do your research and take a look at what content others in your industry are posting.
• Create a Social Media Calendar – This step is an important part for your marketing plan. It should contain intended dates and times that you want to publish on each platform, relevant hashtags and other image notes.
• Time Your Posts for Maximum Engagement – Utilize scheduling features or a third party such as Hootsuite to time your posts for increased visibility.
• Be Original - Avoid repeating the same content over and over again, ensuring each of your articles or pictures gets the most likes.

Know Your Audience

• Define Your Target Market - You should consider characteristics such as age, gender, location, goals and average income.
• Create a Few Audience Personas – Develop “personalities” for your customers. Does Savvy Sally favor locally grown produce when choosing what to feed her family? What types of content would appeal to her? Spend some time looking at your audience personas, understanding what their challenges are and what brands they already love on social media.

Choose Quality Over Quantity

• When quantity increases, quality usually drops because you’re more focused on quotas or a certain number of posts per week. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. Go where your audience is and deliver them value.

Be Human

• One of the worst mistakes to make on social media is coming off as the faceless corporation with zero personality. In the modern age of transparency, people want to get to know your company on a more personal level. If its office photos or snapshots of your team, getting personal with your followers can help you form a more personal connection. If your followers ask a question, you should respond in a timely manner. And if your followers seem to be buzzing about a particular problem, you should craft content that speaks directly to it.

Create Relationships, Not Just Followers

• Having 100 followers who regularly engage with you and your content is much more valuable than 10,000 followers that ignore you. To engage with high-value followers:
• Always @mention people you reference them in your social media posts
• Answer questions people ask
• Reply when people @mention you or share your content
• Don’t just retweet and like other people’s content: reply with a comment to start a conversation

By following our tips above, you should be on the path to social media success! Be sure to stay active on the channels you choose, inactive social media feeds are a bad look for brands. If you’re struggling for original content, share posts from others or find ways to repurpose content so that you’re not always trying to reinvent the wheel. Check out the CropKing Facebook, Instagram and YouTube channels to see what we’re up to!