If you are a social media or marketing manager with a social media program, scaling your presence is the next step to achieving significant growth and maximizing your brand’s impact.
The tricky part, even for the most experienced marketers? Knowing where to start.
We’re here to save the day with eight strategies to help enterprise brands like yours scale their social media presence effectively.
Strategy #1: Start with a Comprehensive Audit
Let’s pause before we hit the ground running. We suggest, before implementing new strategies, beginning with a thorough audit of your existing social media presence.
This will involve evaluating your current performance, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and analyzing your content, engagement, and audience demographics.
This audit will provide a solid foundation and clear direction for your scaling efforts. Here are some tips to get started:
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Review Analytics: Examine data from your social media platforms and tools like Google Analytics to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
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Content Performance: Identify which types of content (e.g. videos, posts, images) get the most engagement and why.
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Engagement Analysis: Look at how your audience interacts with your posts. Which posts get the most comments, likes, and shares? And on which platforms?
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Audience Demographics: Understand the demographics of your current followers. Are they similar to your target audience?
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Sentiment Analysis: Use social listening tools to analyze the sentiment around your brand on social media. You’ll want to assess whether the conversations are positive, negative, or neutral.
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Audit Tools: Utilize social media tools like Social to streamline the process and gain deeper insights.
Plus… you might even find some hidden gems you’ve missed from your customers in the process.
Strategy #2: Conduct In-Depth Audience Research
There’s still more analysis that you can do before you start the scaling work, and that involves understanding your audience better.
For this, you can use social media analytics tools and in-house resources to gather detailed insights into your followers’ demographics, preferences, and behaviors.
This information will help you create more targeted and engaging content, tailor your messaging, and identify new audience segments to expand your reach.
Here are some tips for getting it done:
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Use Surveys and Polls: Directly ask your audience about their preferences and interests through surveys and social media polls.
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Analyze Competitor Audiences: See who follows your competitors and what insights you can gather about their demographics and interests.
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Access Social Media Analytics: There are built-in analytics tools on platforms like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics so you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience. However, we recommend using a comprehensive tool like Social to better analyze across platforms.
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Track User Behavior: Monitor how your audience interacts with your website and social media profiles to identify trends and preferences.
A great way to learn more about your audience? Using social listening and analysis tools connected to your social media profiles; we recommend Social’s Enterprise Plan.
Strategy #3: Develop a Scalable Content Strategy
We’re moving on to the good stuff: It’s time to create a content strategy that supports scalability.
Start by planning a diverse content mix, including videos, infographics, blogs, and user-generated content, informed by the key insights you found in your social media audit.
For planning purposes, use your current content calendar to ensure consistency and maintain a steady flow of high-quality posts. You should also build a plan to repurpose successful content in different formats to maximize its impact across various platforms.
Here are a few tips for scaling your content strategy to increase your presence:
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Repurpose Content: Turn blog posts into infographics, videos into shorter clips, and user-generated content into promotional material.
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Expand Your Content Pillars: Identify key themes or pillars that represent your brand, that maybe you haven’t promoted as much in the past, and create content around these areas consistently.
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Share User-Generated Content: Encourage your audience to create content related to your brand and share it on your platforms.
Strategy #5: Evaluate Competitor Strategies
A little bit of snooping can be a helpful way to scale up your social media presence, as long as you don’t make copying your competitors’ posts your whole strategy!
Analyzing your competitors’ social media strategies can give you some valuable insights and benchmarks.
A good competitive analysis strategy involves:
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Identifying Top Competitors: Make a list of your main competitors and analyze their social media profiles, from where they’re posting to how often they post on each platform.
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Tracking Competitor Content: Note the types of content they post and their engagement metrics, as well as who they seem to be targeting.
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Learning from Successes and Failures: Study successful and unsuccessful campaigns from your competitors to refine your strategies.
Strategy #8: Get Advanced with Analytics
If you truly want to understand the performance of your social media efforts, look towards advanced analytics. Here, you can track key performance indicators (KPIs) like engagement rates, follower growth, and conversion rates.
You can then use these insights to refine your strategies and make data-driven decisions, ensuring your scaling efforts are working.
Here’s what you’ll want to do:
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Identify Key Metrics: Determine which KPIs are most important for your goals, such as engagement rate, reach, or conversion rate.
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Use Advanced Tools: Find the best tools like Google Analytics or Social to gain deeper insights; it’s also helpful to use a combination of these to evaluate different factors.
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Regular Reporting: Set up regular reports to track your progress and make adjustments as needed; bonus points if you set them up to be automated!
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Analyze Trends: Look for patterns and trends in your data to inform future strategies and content planning.
