People need to connect, it’s just human nature. We all yearn to feel a connection to someone, and Social Media is the 21st century’s way of connecting us to the World.

Connections build relationships that span lifetimes, and not just between people, but between brands as well. And social media is the melting pot where brands use their personality to build strong relationships with their customers, creating lasting customer loyalty and powerful advocacy to build not only brand awareness, but revenue and repute.

With so much competition out there, and such an opinionated and diverse audience to cater to, businesses can often feel overwhelmed by the scale of what they’re looking to achieve. With an average of 30 million daily users in the UK on Facebook alone, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine why companies often give up after a few months of struggling to engage an over-exposed and highly-critical online audience.

Social Media is Hard, We Get It

Don’t get it twisted, social media marketing may seem simple enough to tackle, afterall we all have a Facebook account! But it is deceptively strategic, by no means an easy feat or quick fix, and is also paramount to creating lasting success for your business, and a creative and thriving knowledge base for you to develop your brand with unique audience insights.

….and this is where most people run off saying ‘eureka! That’s it! All we need to do is create some social

profiles, see what’s popular with our customers and get posting! 3 times a day should do it!’

These people will fail.

Inevitably they will post unstructured, boring promotional materials, product images, company event pictures and monthly competitions, but there will little to no audience engagement past a few likes here and there, a comment complaining about customer service and pages of photos with nothing but products and price tags.

The whole point of Social Media is being lost on these guys, so don’t be one of those guys!

Just like you use facebook to send hilarious meme’s to your workmates, post a cool picture you took in the city or share news pieces that affect you, so too should your brand. This air of authenticity, of humanising your brand to create real connections with your customers is the key to social media success and long lasting brand advocacy for your business. Just take Forever 21 and their instagram game which boasts over 14 million followers; it’s relevant, posting images and comments about their audience’s celebrity faves, customer post regrams encouraging engagement and product inspo, along with fun quotes and audience relevant phrases that keep the brand up to date and trending. This type of consumer-centric social marketing has rocketed their online and offline reputation, and their ever-so-cool ex-Social Media Manager Mario Moreno said that when the brand was promoting their new plus size range on their social platforms;

‘[we] immediately recognized our followers didn’t want campaign/model images, they wanted to see product on real customers, so we listened and threw away our strategy and developed a new one. The customers/followers appreciated it and engaged more.’

Listening to your audience allows you to cater your brand around them, encouraging loyalty, advocacy and great returns in both brand awareness and revenue.

Bloom’in Success for Social SMEs

Don’t be thinking that this social media game is just for the giants either, SME’s and startups can achieve great success with social media too, just with less of a budget of course. Take Bloom & Wild for example, the London flower delivery service that has used social media to explode their audience and brand awareness, and have cultivated a strong brand personality that is perfect for social sharing. Their Instagram profile has a curated, visually beautiful and natural appeal that their customers love, and doesn’t come across as salesly or pushy which nurtures the brand-customer relationship building process.

Reflecting their audience’s love of styled flora, afternoon tea and elegant colour, Bloom&Wild showcase their relevance, ‘trendiness’, accessibility and expertise to their audience. This makes them highly attractive to a visually stimulated audience, and easy for them to engage with and follow on social.

They translate this across their other social platforms, using each platform for its strength with FB for conversations, Twitter for customer service and Pinterest for major home style decor inspiration.

With just over 5 years since they first opened shop, Bloom&Wild have over 100,000 engaged and valuable social followers, which has elevated them to London’s #1 floral delivery service at lightning speed.

With this has come media attention, magazine interviews, huge revenue increases and nationwide brand awareness thanks to popular high-street publications like Vogue and The Guardian, but it has taken them years of trial and error, budget changes and precious time to get to the level they have today.

Well earned indeed, but you don’t have the time to spend researching the latest social practices and theories. And don’t even get me started on getting the team together to strategise on the topics and posting schedule to cover the brand for the next 6 months. Let alone the mountain of audience insight research that you’ll need to inform this strategy to make sure you’re still relevant.

It takes a village that is true, and over the years that we’ve worked in social media, we know that business-owners don’t always want to know the technicalities of social posting, they just want a quick and actionable list of things they can check off to make sure they are covering their bases in the meantime.  

We’ve put together the SME’s 4-Point Guide to Hacking Social Media Success to make sure that while the main company social media plan is being expertly put together, your brand is still socially developing, visible, relevant and talking to the right people.

SME’s 4-Point Guide to Hacking Social Media Success

• Hashtag Audit
  A quick way to get in front of the right social audience is to check your competitors’ hashtags in their posts. You want to be putting your content in front of a highly motivated audience, and by mimicking your competitors hashtags, you can slide into your potential customer’s social feeds that bit easier and without half the research usually needed.

• Influencer Marketing
  You’d probably be surprised by how many social influencers are already in your circle of friends, and these guys and gals are a sorely under-and-misused resource that young brands and SME’s should make the most of. They already have a large social presence, they have a recognisable voice and persona that (should) resonate with your brand, and they will easily send tonnes of traffic your way thanks to their reach. But it’s key to remember that 30% of consumers are more likely to buy a service/product if it’s been recommended by a non-celebrity blogger, which is testament to the true power of authentic marketing.

• User-Generated Content
  Customers will always trust each other, they won’t necessarily always trust the brand, especially not at first. This is where using your customer’s social posts as promotional material gives an authentic, real-feel to your marketing and encourages customer engagement. Tint report that user generated content creates an increase in conversions of up to 29%, making it a crucial step to engaging a loyal audience.

• Collaboration
  Working in tandem with a business that provides a complimentary service to yours is a simple and highly effective way of reaching a new, relevant audience and massively increasing your site traffic. Look at the Red Bull and GoPro partnership that I am sure you’ve heard of; both companies compliment each other’s adrenaline-junkie core, and provide each other with the brand reach and audience to really engage and convert new customers. This partnership works so well because it makes sense, so make sure that you follow their lead and work with a business that provides your audience with a service that you don’t provide, but compliments those that you do.

These 4 points, though they may seem disconnected from each other, if done properly they will provide you with consistently-generated, relevant and inspirational social content that will provide ongoing traffic to your website.

With the four points above, we’ve given you a solid starting point to start hacking your social channels, to rapidly grow your audience and brand awareness, but it’s not a social strategy to take you through the year. Your team can handle the above points for now, which will give you a great starting point, but in order to really turn your social channels into highly effective revenue streams, you need a well-researched and thorough strategy to cover all aspects of business and social activity.

When you work with an agency, you usually get the standardised yearly-quarter social strategy template, but after working with so many different businesses and industries, we have figured out the best way to create lasting social media success is to create fully flexible and bespoke social media plans that work solely towards your company goals.

It’s not rocket-science, it’s thinking outside of the box, and it’s what we do best. So we encourage you to be the master of your own social media success, and work with iNS to build the social media empire of your dreams.