Take your social media game to another level

It’s easy to get started on social media. But growing and building traction for your brand is another matter altogether. Each platform has its own rules, and mastering them takes time. Even growing traffic to a single page on one of them takes months, if not years, effort. That is why you need HubSpot’s help.

Start with free guides that provide tips and tricks – these are constantly updated and have relevant information at every level, for beginners, intermediate levels and advanced levels. Bookmark this page and return to it regularly. Instead of discovering things on your own, which is a wastefully long exercise, use the knowledge that HubSpot has built over several years and gives out for free.

Get organised and stay focused.

For example, a fitness program needs to follow a regular routine to get results, and social media needs preparation, execution, follow-through, and tracking. No step can be ignored or skipped. Start with what you’re most comfortable with to get around the complexity. Then, add levels and layers. At each point, you’ll find that following HubSpot's advice and templates is immensely helpful. Once you know your way around, you’ll be surprised at how much you and your team can accomplish.

A well-planned and executed social media strategy goes a long way in building traction for brands. But be prepared for the long haul.

Start by creating posts for the social media platforms you are targeting because that’s where it begins. Figure out what you will tackle in stages, then create enough material for a month. Why create so many posts in advance? It allows you to figure out the depth and the effort required to keep the pipeline of posts fed for four weeks.

It gives you time to review, plan and create the next set of posts for the subsequent month.

If you try to short-circuit the process, all that happens is that panic buttons are pressed at every level of the chain, and nothing is achieved. The blame game takes over instead of a coordinated and smooth flow of posts on a planned schedule. 

Creative posts are the raw material for getting engagement. If you don’t carefully plan that part of the process and put in the effort, every subsequent step is time wasted. Initially, even if this first part takes a couple of months, you can speed it up later. But don’t try to create 100 posts in a week and then get frustrated with erratic progress.

Use HubSpot’s Social Media Content Calendar Template

With so many different social networks to manage, it can be tricky to plan which content to share at what time and on which platform. That's why HubSpot has put together a customizable social media content calendar that enables you to organize social media activities far in advance—making social marketing more manageable and effective.

HubSpot helps you plan, schedule, manage and track several social media campaigns across platforms. That helps to build insights and action points for growth.

This easy-to-use Excel template helps you plan updates. It breaks down how to format your content for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest while providing the little hints known to work. Bookmark this calendar template page and share it with your social media team—it's about making your workload much more manageable.

The Content Calendar works for another reason. You can use it to track what creatives appeared and when to measure engagement and response. That’s crucial for determining and sharpening social media messaging.

It is also one of the best ways to organise and plan the scheduling of posts across several platforms. Scheduling tools, tracking tools, and reporting tools are available separately.

HubSpot offers it all in one place, so you know which campaign scores best with customers and gets the most engagement. Once you know that, the rest of the steps follow a clear pattern – how to leverage the interest you have already managed to build.

Learn from your target audience even when they say little.

One way to evaluate response to content is through comments and likes. However, the percentage of people responding is a fraction of those who see the posts. Most of the audience will spend the time and move on unless they feel you have added to their understanding or provided a fresh perspective.

As Amazon and Netflix have discovered, a Thumbs up or down is the best way to get a reaction from buyers or viewers, even though they may have liked the book or the film.

Looking for non-obvious clues is the way to sift through the traffic. Sharing is a great indicator of value being delivered. Getting organic followers beats trying to boost numbers artificially. It may be slower, but it's far more reliable as a metric.

While social media is a good way to generate traffic and interest initially, the effort should be to drive users to the website. That’s where the brand has complete control and can go far deeper into traffic patterns. And, of course, organic traffic to your own website does not have to be paid for.

Staying on top of social media is important because it will be a fresh traffic source. In tandem, pay attention to content development and deployment on your own website, where HubSpot can dive deep into the analytics and reveal more.

It is important to compare which of the social platforms works best for your brand. Then, allocate enough resources and effort to increase engagement.

Talk to us at Blueoshan to set up the workflows and foundations for managing social media. We’ll then work with you to build better engagement.