This past year hasn't been too kind on the world of social media.
With updates regarding COVID19, elections, conspiracy theories flooding our newsfeeds every day, social media has turned into a stressful and anxiety-provoking place.
Especially for businesses, social media in the post-COVID world is a challenging place to navigate. Brands are wary of potential fallouts, of things being taken out of context, which can quickly turn into a potential hazard.
But now, more than ever, as a brand, you need to be in front of your audience.
For social media managers, marketers & businesses that are anxious about how to use social media effectively in the post COVID era, this post is for you.
Click here to download detailed infographic on using social media in post-COVID world.
Importance Of Social Media For Businesses In the Post-COVID-19 Era
Here's why your business needs to have an active & engaging social presence now more than ever.
The Need For Information
In these not so "normal" times, the need for information is at an all-time high. We're all constantly searching for information on news sites, video sharing sites, and the most on social media.
Image Source: Numerator.com
The exact requirement exists with your customers as well.
Whether you're an eCommerce retailer, a restaurant owner, or an institution, your patrons need to know the latest about your business.
And where's the first place they are looking for this information? Well, it's none other than your social media channels.
Keeping an active social media presence in the post COVID era is an absolute necessity for your brand.
You need to give information to your customers when they want it, where they want it.
We're All In This Together
One mantra for the COVID-19 that social media has helped facilitate is that we're all in this together.
Social media got a lot of bad rep this past year for fake news, hoaxes, conspiracy theories & whatnot.
But the medium had a lot of positive impacts as well when the whole world was under lockdown.
It keeps us in touch and helped us reach those who needed our help.
For businesses, an encouraging post thanking your loyal customers, patrons, employees & your local community goes a long way with your audience & for your brand awareness.
The lockdown also led to customers having a huge appreciation for our local businesses, and the attitude seems to only amplify in the post COVID world.
Whether it's a quick share or a positive review, customers are looking to support businesses online however they can, so make sure you're there to be shown some love.
Listening To Your People
The best resource for understanding your customers is your customers.
After being locked in the four walls of their homes for almost a year now, social media has become the only place where they can be vulnerable and share their opinions.
Although some of them will directly give you their opinions without prompting, other's opinions will need to be sought out.
Along with sending out customer surveys, emails or calls, you need to scrub social media for mentions of your brands.
If you're a Statusbrew user, you can actively listen to social conversations about your product, brand, or any industry topic. You can also understand public sentiment & know perception of your content, products, and brand.
Using Social Media In Post-COVID World
Here are some simple tips that can help you effectively use social media in the post COVID era.
Evaluate Your situation
If you, too, like many other businesses, closed off your social media during the pandemic, the first step that you need to take is to - evaluate.
Instead of suddenly resuming social media posting, you need to evaluate the condition of your social channels.
We recommend doing an audit of all your social channels to get insights into the engagement & activity you generated during this 'pause.'
Doing this will help you identify & better understand your weaknesses & strengths, which you can use to modify your existing social media strategy.
Develop A Supporting Brand Voice
Once you're done with the evaluation & the audit, the next step is to reconsider your brand's voice on the platform.
It's pretty apparent that people are in no mood to be pitched directly by marketers in a difficult time like this, so if you're used to being aggressively promotional, it's time to rethink your brand voice.
We recommend developing a positive voice for your brand that ensures your customers feel heard & cared for. Let your audience know that you’re listening.
Adopt a voice and tone that is calm, positive, and shows that you are always ready-to-help.
Avoid Directly Pitching To Customers
Direct pitches can negatively influence your customer behavior, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't talk about the benefits of your products & services.
You can share customer success stories that show how your product helped a customer & you can also encourage customers to share their experiences.
This is a form of indirect marketing and will help you build brand reputation.
Align Your Focus To A Platform
If you're a small business just starting, or you're short on staff, focusing on one or two platforms at first can help you succeed better.
Quite often, we've seen marketers try to target all platforms and then struggle to find an audience that can be converted.
Any social platform can be manipulated to your content, but not every platform will be equally rewarding in converting viewers.
By creating & focusing tailored content for one or just a few platforms, certain aspects such as feedback, conversions, and content sharing become more fruitful.
If it's necessary to have an active presence on all social media platforms, you can reduce the stress of managing all these by having a social media management tool like Statusbrew in place.
Statusbrew centralizes all your social media activity in a single, easy-to-use platform and helps drive your business results.
Schedule & Prioritize
Lack of planning & prioritizing can be one of the most significant factors leading to anxiety.
We recommend setting a content schedule aimed at starting discussions that can lead to community building.
By scheduling posts in advance, you ensure consistency & save tons of time and effort. It also minimizes the chances of sending out rogue & erroneous posts.
We recommend creating a scheduling & approval workflow using Statusbrew.
It's a given that you'll have to hop in and post time-sensitive content often, but for generic things such as holidays & other events, you can schedule content in advance.
Here's an extensive list of national, global & hashtag holidays to help you plan out your strategy. 2021 Social Media Holiday Calendar
Measure
Measure everything you do on social media. Likes, impressions, reach, clicks & other user actions can be easily traced.
Use these metrics to modify your existing social media marketing strategies.
If you're managing and analyzing multiple social networks at a time, using the inbuilt analytics of social networks could be a time-consuming job.
Having an all-inclusive social media management and marketing tool like Statusbrew gives you access to all critical metrics related to all your social networks' performance on a single dashboard.
Try out Statusbrew for your business, sign up right now & start your free trial.
Bottom line
This is the first time in our lives when the world has experienced a pandemic of this scale. Being anxious & overwhelmed is completely normal when you restart your social media marketing.
Nevertheless, by being consistent & following these tips, you can effectively restart your social media marketing & regain your lost online reputation.
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