Videos

How to Build a Strong Social Media Presence

Whether you have an existing business or are starting a new venture out-right, you’re going to reach a point where you need to establish a strong social media presence that boosts your visibility and highlights the brands your target audience is interested in engaging. The truth is, there is no easy shortcut for having a thriving social media following overnight. You need to develop a strategy, actively engage multiple avenues to attract new followers, then do everything physically possible to keep them engaged afterwards. Starting from the top, let’s run through a few ways you can eagerly build a strong social media presence.

Before you even start worrying about how people are going to see your page you need to figure out what’s going to be on it. With what you personally know about the audience you’re trying to attract. Ask yourself, what am I going to post and how often am I going to post it? From high quality memes to eye-catching multimedia that either informs or entertains your audience. There’s no single thing that everyone wants to watch online. Identify what your niche should be.

After that, I would recommend curating a large library of digital media content that you can schedule out to post automatically over an adjustable range of time. As a general rule of thumb, try to have a post ready to go live twice a day, every day. If this comes across as a lofty aspiration, sharing other posts can work well as filler content, but never as your main piece of meat. This content curating phase is important for actually retaining the audience once you begin your organic and paid outreach strategies. The last thing you want is for people to finally start visiting your page or channel, only for it to look like a ghost town. Content is king, and the first thing you should focus on.

Now that you have a gigantic list of scheduled posts let’s talk about those outreach strategies, starting by cultivating organic reach. Every platform has unique features you can leverage to get eyeballs on your content. Facebook for example, has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of groups segmented by common interest. If you’re a motorsports page. Join as many motorsports groups as possible and engage those communities both with personable questions and comments, but also by sharing the content you’re posting on your page. If you’re on LinkedIn or Instagram. Never stop networking. Find your industry and connect with everyone in sight. Trust me, they want followers too!

Some are harder, like YouTube, due to the mass amounts of white noise to overcome, I kid you not, according to Google, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The key to overcoming this is to find external sites to engage people on and bring them back to your YouTube video. Reddit and those common interest Facebook groups are perfect for this. Just make sure you aren’t breaking any self-promotion rules in these external communities.

Now that we have organic reach taken care of, it’s up to you to decide if it’s even worth it to pursue a paid content strategy. Perform a risk analysis exercise. Here are some of the things you should consider. How big is my budget? What am I trying to obtain (leads, page likes, as much reach as possible, etc.)? How well is my organic content performing on its own? Am I beginning to plateau? Do I need to dedicate time to creating media solely to be used paid content? If so, how much time? How good do my results have to be to justify my campaign budget?

Once you begin to ask yourselves these questions it should become clear to you what you’re willing or not willing to pursue. Maybe you’ve come to the determination that the organic strategies we already discussed are performing well enough that you don’t need to put money into your page yet. On the other hand, you could decide that it’s time to invest a bit of money into a pilot run, to see how far X amount of money can get you before committing to a long-term strategy.

Whatever you decide, determine a future date for you to come back and perform this risk analysis again based on the findings from your last assessment.

Now that you’ve taken time to think out your plan on attack, it’s time to execute it. Don’t give up and stay persistent. To be completely honest, it might be a fortnight before you get your first comment. Just wait, and when you get that comment. Engage them as quickly as possible. Coming across as personable and attentive when the moment calls for it goes a long way.

Enjoy this video? We’re the brand-building social media community you’ve been yearning for. Please subscribe and look to the future for more content crafted to help you make the most out of social media. But that’s not all. Looking for a social media partner to help save you time and automate the process of posting high quality content focused on the brands you carry? Visit Thumbstopper.com.

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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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