Creating and maintaining a strong social media presence is incredibly important for businesses and other organizations nowadays. Not only can it provide visibility, but it can also allow for quick updates to followers. While creating a social media presence for your organization is a major first step towards increasing your organization’s visibility, having a presence that’s followed by a truly engaged audience can reap tremendous benefits. Global research shows that half of the world’s population now uses social media in some form or another. As the population grows and even more places around the world gain access to reliable internet, the total number is sure to grow.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all have over a billion users each, which displays the sheer scale of opportunity to build your audience. Twitter has likely already surpassed the 300 million monthly active user threshold. Users can communicate and share information with others through “tweets,” or short posts. While it’s not an entirely unique concept, Twitter offers “retweets,” a feature where users can share other accounts’ posts. This quickly spreads information and can have an exponential effect on overall exposure to something like a sale or an announcement. With a large, engaged audience, a tweet can provide immeasurable benefits at a cost of zero.
Although the rewards can be tremendous, you can also have a social media presence that reaches no one, either due to a lack of an audience, or a disinterested one. Like an audience you’d find at a speech or artistic performance, a social media audience craves several key attributes: connection, clarity, and relevancy. Without these, you can’t attain or even maintain an audience that actively listens to you.
Your Social Media Presence Needs Connection
A connection between an audience and the social media account is formed when the audience feels listened to and valued. Connection is highly important to any type of organization, large or small, since the audience wants to empathize with and understand a message. If you aren’t interacting at least to some extent with your viewer base, many will quit paying attention. Fostering a sense of community and value towards your viewer base can be difficult, as some people are practically impossible to please. However, emphasizing this aspect of your social media presence can bring value over time.
Your Organization’s Posts Need Clarity
Another key success factor that organizations need is clarity. If your audience can’t understand an announcement or misses key details, incongruencies are bound to appear and audience members may feel misled. While some audience members have difficulty paying attention as it is, it’s very important to present a clear and well-constructed message at the very least. Something to add in today’s world, many of us — especially the younger generations — need messages to be short and sweet. Attention spans are decreasing, meaning you have less time to get your message across before your audience gets distracted due in large part to technology. While it may be tempting to run a tweet by your eight-year-old nephew who spends most of his waking hours staring at an iPad before you share it, you should instead understand your audience and their preferences.
Audiences Need Relevancy
Finally, audiences need relevancy. Besides sensationalized news, nobody’s concerned with information that doesn’t affect them. Going along with the connection aspect, audience members need a connection to the information provider, which relevant posts can provide. Your audience wants information that can be helpful to their own lives and well-being; you probably won’t receive much attention if you’re selling rain jackets to residents of a desert.
If you achieve these three aspects, your social media presence should at least have a small audience gathered to hear your latest news and updates. Reaching audience members is another story that will be discussed in another blog post. The importance of engagement through your social media presence is quite profound in this current period and shows a greater return on investment than other forms of marketing in most situations. Whether you’re a business trying to increase sales or a non-profit organization looking for new contributors to pursue your cause, attracting audience members is important and social media is becoming the most effective vehicle to do so.
An intriguing yet controversial example of the power of social media presence can be observed with Sunny Co. Clothing, a clothing brand that released an Instagram post stating that users that reposted a certain picture featuring their red bathing suit and tagging them within 24 hours would receive the swimsuit for free. Although the company didn’t seem to deliver on its promise, the post spread like wildfire, and many saw their Instagram feeds clogged with this picture, and Sunny Co. Clothing’s brand-awareness shot through the roof. This demonstrated just how quickly social media can bring forth attention as opposed to conventional methods of marketing.
With all that said, you should not proceed with or alter your social media marketing strategies without hesitation and forethought. Cleverness and carefully thought-out decision-making are virtues. Understanding your desired — and existing — audience is also crucial. Having concrete, well-defined data to use in your social media marketing can bring you value. This is why we highly recommend that you check out the products that JetStream Social has to offer.