How to Improve Your Social Media Exposure

“Social media management is harder than I thought.” 

That’s how many entrepreneurs and marketers think after promoting their businesses on social media. Do you feel the same way? 

Indeed, reaching customers through social media marketing is becoming more challenging: 70% of small businesses increased investment in social media in 2020. As a result, businesses have a hard time cutting through the noise and making an impact on their customers. 

Below, you’ll find 4 steps to improve social media exposure for your business.

1. Access Your Current Social Media Presence

First, you need to understand where your strategy is lacking focus. Ask yourself these questions:

• What are our biggest problems? They could be a lack of engagement, a low conversion rate, or a small follower base.
• What is our conversion rate from social media traffic? Your conversion rate will help you understand where you stand with social media strategy performance 
• What is our best-converting type of content? Think about which posts drive the most conversions. Do they include images or videos? Are we consistent with our content publishing? Publishing content consistently drives results.

These basics should help you access your performance. They’ll also give you an idea of where you should make more investments.

The next step after the assessment? Focus on metrics that matter. 

2. Update Your Social Media Strategy Metrics

Make sure your social media strategy focuses on the most important metrics to achieve your goals. Tracking vanity metrics is a common mistake that businesses make. 

Vanity metrics include low-value metrics like audience growth. Even if your business page gets 100,000 followers in one day, it’s not helpful if those followers don’t engage with your posts. 

Here are the most useful metrics to track to monitor your social media exposure:

• Click-through rate on your website: The higher your click-through rate, the more people landed on your website after clicking on your social media content. 
• Conversion rate: A conversion rate includes social media users who made a purchase or converted into leads. 
• Social media reach: The number of social media users who viewed your posts is important to understand your performance.
• Cost per click: Compare these two to see if your investment in your current paid campaigns is worth it.

Among these, conversion rate optimization is the most important metric to track your social media presence’s effect on your bottom line. 

3. Focus on the Best-Performing Content

To improve your metrics, start by improving your content across social media platforms.

Take a look at your social media analytics to find the types of content that drive the most traffic to your website or landing page. (If you're unsure how to do this, a digital marketing agency may be able to help you out.)
 
As far as social media is concerned, each blog article needs to have a customer-focused description and an attractive image. This post from Fitbit is a good example because it encourages reading by referring to potential benefits. 

 
By putting more product images, discounts, and offers out there, you have a better chance to increase engagement. After all, 40% of customers follow brands on social media to get discounts and offers, according to the Sprout Social Index report. 

Other social media marketing case studies demonstrate the value of increased social media exposure.

For example, Jonathan Robins Bakery shared a nice, close-up photo of delicious bread. Hashtags will help other interested social media users find their post.

To post about discounts and promotions, you can add the information about the offers in post descriptions. It’s a fast and easy way to share them with customers.

See how Toasted Mallow, a small Arizona-based business, does it. 

 
As you can see, it’s possible to create nice posts without investing thousands of dollars in content. 

Focus on the content that works for you. Check your analytics or try top-performing posts that worked for others. 

4. Avoid Common Social Media Mistakes

Many businesses lose followers without realizing what they’re doing wrong, or not realizing their social media mistakes in time.

To make your social media strategy more customer-friendly, avoid common reasons that make people leave. 

Here are the most important ones according to Sprout Social: 

The top reasons consumers unfollow brands are:

• Poor product or support quality
• Poor customer service
• Irrelevant content
• Excessive ads
• Privacy concerns

Obviously, you can’t control all of these factors. If you invest in high-quality content and make it relevant for to your audience, you increase the likelihood they will remain followers. 

Another thing to keep in mind is social media customer service. According to Sprout Social, 49% of customers leave because they expect brands to respond to their messages and comments.

If you don’t respond to customer messages on social media, those customers might think you don’t care about them. 

To retain more customers and improve their experience, always try to respond to their messages and comments. 

Increase Your Social Media Reach in 2021

There you go, four excellent ways to increase your exposure on social media:

• Understand your current social media presence
• Update social media metrics
• Focus on the best-performing content 
• Avoid mistakes of your competitors

Together, these will give your new strategy a major boost because they make you more organized and focused. 

Keep in mind that many stats you’ve seen here apply to most businesses, though. Your brand is unique – use your social media to create brand assets that helps you stand out. These four tips should give great ideas about where to start improving fast.