Interpersonal connectivity is more ubiquitous today than ever before. You can reach someone through Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, email, or even a good old-fashioned phone call. This unprecedented rate of connectivity means that businesses all over the world are turning to social media as a means of connecting with their extant audience and establishing connections with potential new customers and clients. You can use advanced social media strategies to your benefit, and to the benefit of your enterprise, if you know what you’re doing. The value of a tool, after all, is in how you use it, and social media is a tool that can be used for many, many different applications.

1. Basics Come First 

Don’t put the cart before the horse. Always identify your objectives and what it is you’re aiming to achieve with your social media strategy before you embark upon your project, and always ensure that your social media strategy revolves around a single, constant philosophy. To work out what exactly your philosophy should be, have a look at your audience and what they all have in common apart from their interest in your business, product, or service. The uniting factor in the situation will give you a good indicator as to the philosophy you need to cultivate for your advanced social media strategy.
 

2. Make the Most of Each Platform

You wouldn’t use a screwdriver to hammer nails, and you wouldn’t cut wires with a wrench. Each of these tools need to be used for its intended purpose in order to get the most out of it, and you need to apply this logic to your social media strategy. Optimizing platforms means targeting content to the audience on each platform. YouTube audiences, for example, are different from those on Facebook, Tumblr, and Snapchat, so you must tailor your content on each platform for maximum impact and resonance with that particular audience. On this note, be sure to stay on top of new, developing platforms so you can exploit the hot new trends before they blow up; getting early access to an otherwise untapped market puts you well ahead of the competition, no matter what your business is plying.

3. Multimedia Content

You also can’t just post one type of content on your page and call it a day. [tweet_dis inject=”@DonnaAmos”]Content marketing is actually a skill unto itself, and the phrase “content is king” is a universal platitude of digital marketing for a reason. You need to keep yourself informed as to the recent trends in the type of content that users find engaging on social media and have a variety of content to appeal to a variety of people. For example, on some social media platforms, long content that is well researched and highly informative performs far better than short buzzwords and slogans. Young people today have better research skills than any other generation and they appreciate feeling well informed by their chosen brands and businesses. Accompany your text with pictures to increase its visibility, and be wary of adding too many links to any of your content.
When you’re using video content, be aware that the attention span afforded to videos differs from platform to platform. Facebook users generally won’t watch videos for more than a few minutes, while the YouTube audience is happy to watch informative, engaging content for anywhere between ten minutes and half an hour. Remember the Invisible Children campaign? That thirty-minute video had people glued to their screens and blew up virtually overnight. In short, using more than one type of media is a great way to stay in touch with your audience and keep them feeling engaged.

4. Flatter Your Audience

Flattering your audience doesn’t mean you’re supposed to give them compliments or tell them they’re fantastic for buying your product. People love to engage with brands and businesses online, so you should capitalize on that and offer them the chance to do so. This means create hashtags unique to your service that summarize your philosophy and attitude and encourage users to create their own content with that hashtag attached. You might also ask for ten-second videos of people wearing your branded clothing, for example, or for them to send photos of them using your product. Our you could do something similar to the image below, where we recognize followers on Instagram as great solopreneurs. This kind of social media strategy makes your audience feel valued and important, creating brand loyalty within your consumer base.