Social media is here to stay and the party is just going to get bigger and louder so you might as well leave your corner, join the party and embrace it.

I believe any company, organisation or individual who wants to remain relevant to its audience and appeal to new ones must adopt social media as part of their brand communications strategy.
If a brand is not online, where is it? Who is it talking to, engaging with, displaying its products for, and promoting its services? Let’s be real, most of what we do on social media is free and it’s fun.

Why social media?

I want to help you demystify the myths around social media; I want to show you through a few basic steps that you too can have fun, engage with your audience and build your presence online.
The way to approach social media is to look at it as a reflection of the “off-line” world. By this I mean, we should be able to answer the following questions about our readers and clients in order to develop a strategy and set up online goals:

1. Do I know where to find my audience?
2. Do I know what they like and are interested in?
3. Do I know what makes them go ‘wow’?

Let’s say you had a blog about healthy food, and that your key readers are the healthy eaters, those trying to lose weight and who also have a well-balanced lifestyle.

You have also identified that the healthy group enjoy preparing their own food and therefore they always look for inspiration through recipes and pictures.

If you have a blog about food you will hopefully love cooking, experimenting with new recipes and taking photos of the dishes you make. With photos in your phone and recipes in hand, you are then able to provide your audience with the end result. You may do this through producing videos or typing the process up onto your blog, alongside outstanding photographs.

With all this content in hand, the next step is to choose the most appropriate platforms to promote your content online. As you may know Pinterest is great for visuals, Instagram and Facebook are amazing for sharing images and videos, and for the more adventurous and young at heart, Snapchat is ideal.

What I like about Instagram and Pinterest is that both social platforms bring users suggestions on what they might be interested in, beyond users own network of followers/friends. Pinterest for instance gives users suggestions on other posts similar to their previous searches, which means that they don’t only interact with their friends and users they follow, but also with content which may be relevant to them.

Of course the social networks are not always right, and sometimes will share some irrelevant content with us, but the same way you are exposed to anyone’s content, yours also gets a chance to be in front of other people’s eyes and, the best way to make sure your content is seen, is usually through the use of hashtags.

Hashtags are very useful because, through exploring them, using and testing them in your posts, you will not only find out what catches your readers’ attention but you will also attract new followers and engage with other like-minded users.

Make sure you have well defined objectives for your online activities and that those are aligned with your business goals; be clear on whether your goal is engagement with your current followers, gaining new followers, or driving traffic to your blog or website, etc.

Do I need to say I am passionate about social media? If I could I would talk about it forever. I truly believe that, anyone with clear objectives, intentionally and the right content, can make the most of social media and profit from it.

Alexsandra Silva
Digital Content Marketer
Instagram: @alexsasocial @ibecomeofficial