Social media is one of the biggest contributors to internet usage. With a broad reach, it essentially levels the playing field for niche brands and mammoth-like conglomerates. Both have equal opportunity to reach their target audience, leverage the platforms and get profit-inducing conversions.
A strong social media marketing strategy allows interacting with your potential buyers, helping you understand their pain points and delve into feedback right away. By creating momentum through alternative marketing, it stands as the best option to boost personal branding.
A one-to-one approach generates leads, accentuates recall and builds loyalty without the excess outlay of traditional advertising. However, there is no one-size-fits-all secret to social media success.
Much like social media services in London need to employ a combination of methods, rapidly stay atop of trends, react to your mentions, deliver quality content consistently and regularly engage to see the initial signs of growth. It doesn’t have to be all daunting, though.
There are many apps accessible in the market that automate the grunt work to ensure you’re concentrating on the creative and strategic aspects of the plan.
Here is how you can leverage social media tools to establish and boost a personal brand.
Build a Digital Real Estate
Social media fame is never the end goal. It is only the means to an end. All your processes, efforts, and investment should redirect your audience to a page or place that is truly yours. It can either be a landing page or a full-fledged website that holds all the essential conversion links.
By building a home on the internet, you can give your target buyer a permanent place to find you, no matter how social media algorithms change. Include this link into your bios and descriptions for maximum impact.
To create a website, you can use –
1. WordPress: WordPress is one the most straightforward applications out there to create a page for your brand. The endless number of themes and plugins make it apt for all your digital needs in a comprehensive manner.
2. Squarespace: The drag-and-drop tool is a boon for beginners with aesthetic themes and templates. It eliminates the need to study any coding or possess any technical knowledge to get started.
3. Wix: Again, a drag-and-drop builder, Wix lets your build a site primed for e-commerce applications from the get-go. An easy-to-use editor helps with portfolios and business website as well.
Monitor Your Audience and Brand
Social listening is the most underrated superpower of social media platforms. It essentially lends you an ear to your audience’s thoughts and conversations. Whether your prospects mention you or not, close monitoring gives you an insight into the kind of content that resonates with them. It also helps tap on social media trends and opportunities, making you a maven in the field.
To effectively listen to what your customers have to say, use –
1. Mention: Mention is a robust real-time monitoring platform that allows you to track your brand throughout the social media network with a single click. Simply enter your name in the search box, and you shall find everyone who is talking about you. With connected platforms, it further gives you the power to react within the app.
2. TweetDeck: Specially curated for Twitter, the organization and management app lets you handle multiple accounts with equal ease. You can follow different feeds, create a criteria-based search and participate in hashtags, all from one place.
3. Brand24: The social media tool markets itself as – “instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews and more.” An automated sentiment analysis, spliced reports, and end-to-end traffic make it a must-have app in your arsenal.
Content Curation and Creation
Content on social media goes far and wide than just the written word. Graphics, video and opinionated posts hold equal if not more importance in the social ecosystem. While creating something unique from scratch can be a tedious affair, you can always leverage your social listening skills to build a curated feed. The key is to add value to the user’s time by delivering vital information that aligns with your brand value.
Here are a few means at your disposal to do the same –
1. Scoop.it: An app for curating content on your relevant topics and distributing them across your network. It monitors global sources to build credibility, establish thought leadership and target niche as well as mainstream publications.
2. Canva: The free-to-use tool allows you to create the perfect image to go with your post. There are pre-set templates for each platform, optimizing the dimensions for a full view. It further has an Android and iOS app for on-the-go editing.
3. Medium: It is a free blogging platform to expand on your thoughts over and above the social media character limit. Working as a publishing portal, you can redirect your audience from social outlets to Medium and finally get them to your website using embedded videos and inline comments.
Post Scheduling
Contrary to what you may think, social scheduling is not about ignoring the posting aspect of the platforms. It instead allows you to drill down on the optimal times and content forms for maximum outreach and engagement. Automation tools open up the resources for customer conversations and community building.
1. Sprout Social: Optimized for brands of all sizes, the calendar and scheduling tools bring bulk publishing to the table. An interactive interface and asset management library further open it up for collaborations.
2. Airtable: By blending the content planning and scheduling phases, Airtable lets you develop a sense of consistency across all your networks. A preview gives an idea of what the final post will look like to accommodate any last-minute changes.
3. Buffer: A direct and simple interface with a single-click publishing feature makes Buffer the cream of the crop. Apart from scheduling, content suggestions, and mobile app make it a holistic experience.
Wrapping it Up
Building a personal brand is a long haul, and you must take all the help you can get. Leveraging social media apps and platforms to build expertise in the market can help you grow it exponentially in no time.