Ways to Make Social Media More Relevant

Social media relevance refers to how interesting and engaging your target audience finds your content. With a relevant social media profile, you can attract more traffic and create a fertile ground for generating and converting leads.

However, many brands have trouble creating relevant media that triggers interest and excitement, leading to disappointing social media engagement and traffic. If your organization has similar problems, we’ve created a comprehensive guide on how to stay relevant on social media. Follow these steps to create and use relevant media to supercharge your online presence.

1. Set SMART Goals

Before launching any social media campaign, you should have clearly stated goals that spell out what you hope to achieve by the end of the campaign. Without such goals, you may have trouble measuring the campaign’s success.

An effective goal-setting technique is following the SMART criteria. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Here’s a quick overview of what each term means:

• Specific: You must have specific goals that you hope to achieve by the end of your social media campaign. For example, your goal could be to generate a thousand leads within a month via a Facebook campaign targeting people in New York.
• Measurable: Having measurable goals will simplify monitoring your progress. For example, if your goal is to generate a specific number of leads within a given time, failure to meet your target would mean you underperformed.
• Achievable: Your goals should be realistic, and you should have the tools and skills needed to achieve them. Otherwise, you may keep setting goals without ever achieving any of them.
• Relevant: Your goals should contribute to the success of your brand. For example, you can run a social media campaign to generate leads or improve brand awareness and online visibility.
• Time-Bound: You should have a deadline for fulfilling your goals. The due date must be realistic, or achieving your set goals could become impractical.

With SMART goals, you are less likely to post on social media aimlessly and end up with intangible results.

2. Find Your Audience

Knowing your target audience is key to posting relevant media on social platforms and getting desired results. Your target audience is the specific group of people you hope to reach via your social media campaign. You may target a specific gender, age group, or people in particular locations or lines of work.

When you know your target audience, you can craft and publish social media posts that are more likely to engage and resonate with them. If you publish content that your target audience doesn’t care about, your engagement will be poor, leading to low relevance.

Identifying your target audience will also enable you to post content on the preferred platforms of your target audience. According to the Pew Research Center, 30 to 39-year-olds use Facebook more than any other age group, while 18 to 29-year-olds prefer YouTube. Don’t forget – Content that cannot engage your audience cannot convey your message or achieve your stated goals.

3. Create Relationships

According to a 2017 Microsoft customer service report, 77% of customers prefer brands that ask for customer feedback. Also, 68% of customers prefer brands that provide proactive customer service updates. These figures prove that customers love brands that actively communicate with them.

Since a significant percentage of your potential and existing customers already use social media, it’s the perfect platform for engaging with them. However, don’t just engage with customers by providing product updates. Instead, build relationships by showing the human side of your company. Do this by posting content about the social activities of your company and employees.

Also, regularly engage with everyone by asking and answering questions on social media. Responding to questions will show your audience that you care about their opinions and listen to what they want. Building relationships with your audience and showing you care will foster brand loyalty. If you didn’t know, 73% of customers are happy to pay more for your products if they love your brand.

4. Build a Calendar

No how-to stay relevant on social media guide will be complete without discussing the importance of building and using a content calendar. A content calendar facilitates planning and scheduling when to post content on your social media pages. By following the calendar, you can avoid missing deadlines and post content consistently to keep your audience engaged.

If you post inconsistently, your audience won’t have a reason to keep checking your social media, leading to low engagement. An unengaged audience will not consider your social media as relevant.

Another advantage of working with a content calendar is keeping track of already published content and avoiding repeating content ideas. However, before creating a calendar, perform research to discover the best times and frequency for posting. Consistently posting at the right times will allow you to get maximum engagement from your target audience every time you publish content.

5. Automate

Besides having a content calendar or schedule, you can post on social media more effectively by automating the publishing process. A content automation system will use your schedule to post content at specified times on your chosen platforms.

With the right automation system, you can save time and money, remain consistent, and ensure optimal audience engagement. Alternatively, opt for fully managed services that can handle content ideation, creation, publishing, and more on your behalf.

6. Amplify and Test Your Visuals

If you want your social media to remain interesting and engaging, you need to experiment with different types of content. Even if you already have content that attracts lots of traffic and engagement, you can tweak and amplify that content to get better results.

At Cohley, we perform content testing to help clients find the best visuals for creating connections with their target audience. To learn more, check out our video and photographic content campaign solutions.

7. Stay Active

Did you know that increasing your monthly posts from at least one or two to six to eight can double your leads? That’s why one of the most popular tips on how to stay relevant on social media is staying active.

Almost everyone comes to social media seeking engagement, be it from entertaining content, news updates, product research, or meeting new people. If your social feed becomes inactive, your audience will seek engagement elsewhere, and getting back a lost audience can be trying and expensive.

As such, stay active by frequently posting with the help of content calendars and automation. If you have trouble coming up with fresh content for regular posts, you can keep your audience engaged with user-generated content.

8. Use Trends

Posting random content is not an effective strategy for staying relevant on social media. Instead, create and post relevant media by finding out what’s trending. Trending topics are what your target audience is currently interested in and talking about, and they want more information about that topic. Capitalize on this phenomenon by publishing posts related to trending topics.

If your target audience mostly uses Twitter, you can use the Explore tab to discover what’s trending. On Facebook, navigate to the upper right corner of your newsfeed to discover trending topics. Alternatively, use Google Trends to discover what people in your target location are looking for online.

9. Have a Data-Driven Approach to Digital Content

If you want social media campaigns that yield tangible returns on investment, you need to take a data-driven approach to create and publish content. Fortunately, several analytics tools are available for easily identifying your best-performing content, rival content, valuable tags and trends, and more.

Leveraging these tools will help eliminate guesswork from creating content. Reducing guesswork will position you to publish relevant content consistently and bring you closer to achieving your SMART goals.

Time to Boost Your Social Media Relevance

Now that you know how to stay relevant on social media, does it sound like a lot of work? If so, the good news is you don’t have to do it yourself. At Cohley, we help brands like yours handle all aspects of their content creation for various social media platforms.

By relying on expert content creators, you can focus your energy on other aspects of running your brand and look forward to having top-shelf content for your pages. Contact us today to learn more about how we can provide you with content that promotes your brand and keeps your audience returning for more.