5 definitive tips to succeed on social networks

All companies want to gain visibility on social networks. However, they all face very fierce competition. Internet users follow many pages and this number is still growing. This reduces the organic scope of publications and sponsored publications are not possible due to lack of time and/or money. The attention time for each publication decreases: it is imperative to put in place good practices to succeed on social networks.

1. Optimize publications

This is not a big news but it is nevertheless the basis of an analysis on Social Media Optimization. We can never say enough that publications are the nerve of a good strategy on social networks. The explosion of the number of formats and features on each social network (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google + ...) multiplies the possibilities to communicate via this channel.

Points to remember:

• Respect the publication dimensions of each social network

• Identify a person, a page via an @ if necessary: increase the organic scope

• Use # to increase visibility (mandatory for Twitter and Instagram, less important for Facebook and Pinterest)

• Short and concise text content: the superfluous is to be banished

• Multiply the type of content: link, video, photos, visual, computer graphics, GIF ...

All of these techniques are often a great way to increase your engagement on social networks: more likes, reactions, comments or even sharing. The key to gaining visibility and becoming the darling of algorithms like Facebook's EdgeRank.

If you want to increase your available content, it is very easy to directly ask your community to create and use it. You facilitate the production of qualitative content, vary the style of content and its approach, but you also increase the interactions with your community (proximity).

2. Understand your audience's expectations

Ultra-competitive social networks are pushing companies to change their strategy. The client must be taken into account even before the company's objectives. We talk about customer-centric strategy. To remain visible, it is important to understand your audience's expectations and needs in terms of information. To gain traction, you have to give your customers the best deals, freebies or giveaways. Suppose you're into an online mattress business so your content must be informative and catchy. 

Ask yourself a few questions:

• Is my audience composed of clients or prospects?

• Is my audience mature?

• What information does my audience seek?

• How does my audience consume content?

• Which publications work best?

Many social media tools allow you to accurately and accurately monitor statistics on your social network pages. You have the possibility to know both the audience (age, language, interests, geographical location), user behavior and statistics of scope (organic or fee) and the commitment of each publication. We, therefore, find tools offered by social networks (Facebook Insight or Twitter Analytics ) and third-party tools (Mention, Klout, HootSuite). The latter offer both e-reputation and e-reputation tools, as well as statistics specific to your pages.

4. Be on the right social networks

There is no better social network than another. They all have advantages and disadvantages depending on the sector of activity, the objectives and the editorial charter of each company. The advantage of Facebook is its very large community, of all age groups while Twitter and Snapchat are social networks very popular among younger people. Instagram and Pinterest will be able to sublimate your products by its sense of aesthetics.

Think about the many possibilities of each social network and create an excellent, coherent communication strategy. Ideally, you should not use social networks in the same way: it can get tired of Internet users and make you lose visibility and commitment.

5. Optimize your presence on search engines

A powerful social media strategy gives your company a better chance of being present on the top positions of Google's SERP for example. Each social network page can be indexed by Google and other search engines like Bing: this increases the visibility and thus the traffic either to the website or to the social networks. Traffic on social networks can be directed to the website or other social network pages.

Working on optimizing your social networking pages is not a waste of time. However, this sometimes time-consuming action requires using the right social networks, the right techniques, and the best tools to have good results.

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