How To Effectively Scale Social Media

When browsing through our personal social media accounts, some things catch our eye and are worth a click while others simply pass us by. We choose to look at information and entertainment based on our overall interests and immediate concerns. When thinking about social media marketing, you want to home in on the wants and needs of your current and potential customers to create a situation where your brand becomes something interesting and necessary for your target audience. The question is, how do you accomplish this lofty goal effectively when dealing with thousands or even millions of current or potential customers? Today, we aim to share some strategies surrounding how to build and manage a successful social media presence.

Build Your Brand Through Social Media

Social media is all about establishing and maintaining personal connections. As a result, scaling to large audiences becomes that much more of a challenge. How do you create authentic social media copy, develop widespread interest, and then maintain this interest over several social media channels? It’s not easy. Our suggestion to you? Start small and think about the fundamentals. Successfully build your brand according to your philosophy, then take a look at the bigger picture.

Here are seven strategies to build your brand:

1. Set and reset reasonable goals: The big, long-term goal for most social media campaigns involves building meaningful relationships, developing a positive reputation, and establishing loyal customers to drive organic awareness of your product. When you’re first starting a campaign, consider these big goals and scale them appropriately to make them measurable. Do you want to generate new clients? Do you want to promote a seasonal product? Think about what you want in the short term, then regularly evaluate and revise those goals to fit your long-term strategy.

2. Know your target audience: Consider who is going to purchase your services and create a social media strategy that caters to that demographic. Consider where they live, their occupation, their age, their values, and their interests. For example, if you’re catering to working families, discuss how your services can save them time and create a safe home environment. Use eye-catching graphics and meaningful content to help this message resonate with your potential customers. In the end, to effectively reach your audience, you need to know who they are, what they want, and why they want it.

3. Choose your social media platform based on your target audience: There are a lot of social media entrepreneurs who are constantly developing new ways to share information over the Internet. In 2021, over three billion people used social media in some form or another, and its popularity is on the rise. Therefore, everyone wants to cash in, meaning that there are more and more avenues to share your brand via social media. We have the big players: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. There’s also LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, WhatsApp, TikTok … the list goes on and on. Tapping into all these social media channels can be overwhelming, and when you’re first starting to build a social media presence, you have to choose the avenue that is the best fit for you, your goals, your audience, and your brand. Take full advantage of existing social media platforms without spreading yourself too thin.

4. Know your competition: You can gain a lot of insight by studying the strategies of similar companies—whether they’re your competitors or not. It’s likely in a service-based industry that you’re targeting a certain geographic region. Take a look at social media campaigns designed by successful companies elsewhere and learn from their successes and failures.

5. Collaborate with influencers: If you know an influencer with a successful social media presence or a company that offers a service that’s compatible with yours, work together. Promote each other’s brands to take advantage of a wider audience.

6. Get organized and be consistent: Be reliable with your posts. You want to make sure your audience can count on you to deliver content. If you offer weekly insights and monthly promotions, you must consistently follow through. Fortunately, there are a myriad of tools available to help you schedule and automate your social media posts so that you’re not scrambling to create and deliver content.

7. Surprise your audience: Even with a calendar and consistent social media posts, you can still surprise your audience with flash sales, advertisements, or special promotions. You can choose to create this content around a holiday, current event, or just because. These special surprises will help you build your reputation and establish a loyal audience.

Ideally, these seven strategies will help you build an audience that will start to interact and share your content. Over time, this audience will grow. As it does, you want to make sure you avoid unnecessary growing pains by having a plan in place that helps you maintain your authority and reputation among a larger audience.

How To Share With A Growing Audience

As more people interact with your content, you want to maintain quality and authenticity. Social media is all about personal connections; therefore, you may frown upon the idea of scaling and automating content. Fortunately, there are ways to automate to be creative, productive, and consistent so that you can ensure your material stays relevant even when you have to focus your energy elsewhere. 

When it comes to automating content, you don’t have to put the whole thing on cruise control, but you do want to ensure you’re posting enough to generate traffic. Here are a few important things to consider when thinking about scaling your social media content:

• You are dealing with a fragmented audience. This means people won’t see everything all the time. Therefore, you must post enough to catch them with your information without wasting time and energy or flooding their social media platforms with content that they don’t find interesting. 

• People have different preferences. Think about your target audience and how they prefer to engage with content. Some put all their energy into one channel while others have multiple social media accounts. Consider which platforms work best for your brand and focus in on those. 

• Create a calendar and utilize available publishing tools. We discussed the importance of developing organizational strategies when beginning your social media account. As brand awareness grows, this becomes increasingly important. Furthermore, publishing tools can help you cross-post between social media platforms consistently. 

• Track your growth and learn from the data. Be sure to constantly audit your content and recalibrate. If you have a post that’s particularly successful, consider that content and how you can replicate parts of that strategy without being redundant. You may find that videos generate more clicks or that people want more information about a certain service during the summer months. Capitalize on these interests and revise your strategy as needed.

As awareness of your brand grows, posting content can become overwhelming, and you want to make the best use of your valuable time. Time management and creating meaningful posts involves scheduling and tracking data. By automatically scheduling the frequency and placement of your posts, you create consistency. You don’t have to automate all content, but by using scheduling tools, you can rest assured that you’re continuing to communicate with your audience if things get overwhelming. By tracking and revising your social media strategy, you can make sure you’re using your energy to effectively reach your audience.

When To Avoid Automation

Using readily-available automation tools to consistently share and evaluate content will save you time and money. However, some elements of your overall social media presence simply can’t be accomplished effectively through automated methods.

• Content is key. When dealing with online marketing, the quality of your content is so important. Make sure that it’s engaging and consistent. If not, it won’t help, it won’t be worth your time, and it may even damage your reputation. Remember, you’re the expert in your field, and you want to be professional and accessible when sharing information and promotions. Even when automating the publishing of content, you want to make sure you’re still delivering authentic posts. You also want to continue to be engaging. This requires creativity, quality writing, and thoughtful graphic design. These elements cannot be automated. 

•  Engage in genuine interactions. People use social media platforms to engage with your employees and your brand. People have private discussions online (via chat tools) and public discussions in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. When interacting with current and potential customers, you want to be genuine to maintain your positive reputation. 

• Respond to feedback. People will leave reviews or comments via Google, YouTube, Better Business Bureau, Facebook, Yelp, and other social media channels. Be sure to respond. Thank them for their feedback. Acknowledge praise and respond meaningfully to their complaints. In a perfect world, your reviews would be filled with admiration and appreciation. However, for one reason or another, customers sometimes aren’t satisfied. Show that you care. Take in their complaints, honor their opinions, and offer meaningful solutions. Other people will respect your desire to honor and improve the customer’s experience.

In this day and age, automation can do a lot, but no robot can genuinely engage with customers. Be sure that you take the time and effort to be authentic when it matters most. After all, you are the expert in your field, and you want to make sure you’re putting your best face forward when communicating with any audience – small or large.

FieldRoutes Can Help You Build Sharable Content

At FieldRoutes, we pride ourselves on our ability to effectively create meaningful and informative content for the companies we serve. We care deeply about your business’s growth, which is why we take the time to get to know you and your brand. With an understanding of who you are and the services you provide, we can create content—like blogs that specifically address the questions and concerns of your customers and prospects—which can easily be shared on social media platforms. 

Furthermore, we provide recommendations for strengthening your online presence. Depending on your needs and growth goals, we can rebuild/update your website, integrate user-friendly tools to interact with customers, create effective advertisements, and develop sharable content that reflects your skills and your services. 

We pride ourselves in utilizing the most advanced reporting and analytic tools to ensure your marketing strategy continues to yield the best results possible. We customize our services to help you meet your unique growth goals so you always grow at your own pace. To learn more about how FieldRoutes can help you build a brand that generates leads, keeps costs low, and ultimately increase your sales, reach out to us today.

Call for a Demo at 207.492.4235

Join the number of thriving businesses using FieldRoutes to acquire new customers, improve automation, and crush the competition.

Works Cited

Michael, Blake. (2021, December 2). “Three Ways to Grow Your Social Media Presence.” Forbes. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/12/02/three-ways-to-grow-your-social-media-presence/?sh=7197f50726de

Smarty, Ann. (2019, January 14). “How to Scale Your Social Media Marketing to Build Traffic and Leads.” Search Engine Watch. Retrieved from: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/01/14/scale-social-media-marketing/

Thimothy, Solomon. (2021, March 26). “How To Scale A Social Media Marketing Company: Three Steps You Need To Take.” Forbes. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/05/26/how-to-scale-a-social-media-marketing-company-three-steps-you-need-to-take/?sh=1b3a04487ee4