10 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Presence: Tools and Strategies

Do you want to improve your social media presence? While you might have lots of different social media accounts, your presence may be lacking.

This could show up as problems such as:

• Few followers on your social media accounts. You keep posting or tweeting, but very few people are seeing your posts.
• Followers … but little engagement. Your posts rarely get a “like,” let alone a share or comment.
• Negative comments. Perhaps people are complaining about your posts being too self-promotional, for instance.

Here are 10 different ways to improve your social media presence – without spending lots of time doing so.

1. Establish Your Brand Voice and Create Clear Guidelines

Everything you put out on social media should tie in with your brand. That could be serious, light-hearted, funny, silly, edgy, or whatever makes sense for your company. It should tie in with your website and other media, too.

If you have multiple people managing your company’s social media, it’s essential to have clear, written guidelines on what “voice” they should use. (Include plenty of examples, either from your own past posts or inspiration from other companies social media accounts.)

Even if it’s only you posting on social media, it’s still worth spending some time establishing your brand voice. While this means investing a little bit of time and effort upfront, it can make it much easier to make decisions during the day-to-day running of your social media accounts.

Your guidelines don’t need to be long or complex. A few bullet points and some examples might be plenty to get started with.

2. Focus on a Smaller Number of Social Media Sites

Some marketers think that “presence” means “being everywhere” – but it doesn’t! There’s no point in spreading yourself so thin across a dozen social media platforms that you have no time to establish a following on any of them.

Instead of running lots of different social media accounts, pick a small number of networks (no more than three) to concentrate on. Choose the networks where your ideal customers are likely to congregate. For instance, if you’re targeting an audience of Gen-Z, then it would probably make sense to establish a presence on TikTok. If you’re aiming for an audience of retirees, Facebook is likely to be a much better bet.

3. Use Social Media Tools to Save Time and Build a Winning Strategy

There are loads of social media tools that can save you time, get better results for you, or (in many cases) both. If you’re manually opening up your Twitter app every time you want to tweet or puzzling over whether your posts are really seeing the engagement you’d hope for, then use some social media tools to help.

A couple of great ones to try are:

Buffer – this lets you easily queue up multiple social media posts in advance. You can cross-post to several platforms or create unique posts for each different platform. Buffer also has tools to measure the results you’re getting – plus, it makes it easy to reply to comments. 

ShareThis tools – there’s a range of tools to choose from here. Still, the social media share buttons are handy for driving more social shares (thus boosting your presence by getting your content in front of people who aren’t yet following you).

Check out tools that are specific to your key social networks, too, such as this list of essential tools for Instagram.

4. Publish High-Quality Content

Your social media content is a reflection of your brand. You don’t want to publish posts riddled with typos or careless errors. Equally, if you’re publishing images or videos, you want these to look as good as possible.

If you have the budget for it, invest in high-quality creative content. That doesn’t necessarily mean paying for every individual piece to be created by a designer. Instead, you could pay for a template that can be used repeatedly and then add free (but high-quality) stock photos.

Even if you’re creating content yourself, it’s worth spending a few extra minutes proofreading the text and checking that the images look good. It’s a small time investment that could really make your social media presence look more professional.

5. Don’t Post New Content TOO Often

When you’re trying to grow your social media presence, it’s easy to think that means publishing as much content as possible. But posting loads of content can end up getting annoying for your followers, especially if your posts don’t offer a lot of value but merely clog up their social media feeds. 

Posting too frequently means you’re unnecessarily using up your time (and potentially paid resources). It’s likely to be counterproductive, as you’re also more likely to rush, make mistakes, and post lower-quality content.

There’s no magic number for how often you should post on social media, but research from Hootsuite suggests you should aim to publish content:

• Once a day (or less) on Instagram.
• 1 - 2 times a day on Facebook.
• 1 - 5 times a day on Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you’re posting much more than this – say, 4 times a day on Facebook or 3 times a day on Instagram – then try dramatically scaling back to see whether this ends up improving your social media presence.

6. Strike a Balance Between Different Types of Content

Have you ever encountered a brand account on social media that seemed to be about self-promotion and nothing else? Perhaps every single tweet told you about their products – or at least about their blog posts – or every image on Facebook related to their company.

While it’s important to mention your products and services on social media, you want to strike a balance between self-promotional content and content designed to serve your audience. That could mean posting useful tips, links to resources that aren’t your own, questions or polls, or even funny memes.

You’ll also want to think about publishing a mix of different post formats: some text, some images, and some videos. If you always publish the same types of content, people may start switching off.

7. Optimize Your Social Media Bios

You want to make the most of your social media presence by bringing people back to your website. After all, you’re not just collecting social media followers (or likes and comments) for the sake of it; you’re hoping that some of your followers will convert into customers.

Many businesses overlook the importance of their social media bios. It’s easy to end up quickly creating these when setting up your social media account – only never to touch them again.

Your social media bio is one of the first things that people may see when they start following you (or even before they decide to follow you or like your page). Use it to let people know what your company does, and make sure you link to your website – or even to key pages on your site, like a key product’s landing page.

It only takes a few minutes to update your social media bio, but it could significantly affect how effectively you capitalize on your social media presence.

8. Consider Using Sticky Posts or Pinned Tweets

One under-used feature on many social media networks is the ability to “stick” or “pin” a post to the top of your page. This means that it always shows up first in your feed, even when there are other, more recent posts.

Sticky posts or pinned tweets can let you:

• Highlight a particular message to everyone who visits your page – for instance, promoting your most recent product.
• Save time on repeating the same information to multiple people (answering questions like “what are your opening hours?”).

If you’re using a sticky post, make sure you review it regularly to check it’s still the best one to use. Something important a month ago could quickly become outdated.

9. Set Clear, Measurable Goals for Your Social Media Presence

Social media can be a huge time drain. It’s easy to end up spending an awful lot of time looking at other people’s accounts, wondering what to post, and not being too sure if you really see any results.

By setting clear and measurable goals, you’ll know what you’re aiming for, and you can focus your social media marketing time accordingly.

For example, you might decide that when growing your social media presence, your goal is to reach a certain number of followers (e.g., 1,000). You can track your follower growth each week to measure your progress toward your goal.

10. Create a Content Calendar for Your Social Media

Creating a content calendar (or editorial calendar) for your social media might sound like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to take long, and it’ll save you a huge amount of time and effort in the long run.

One great way to create a quick content calendar is to come up with themes for different days of the week. For instance, you might always post a funny meme on Fridays or publish a new video on Tuesdays.

Planning ahead also makes it easy to tie in your social media posts with the whole of your content marketing strategy. For instance, you could plan to post about promotions you’re running or create posts that link with content that you’re publishing on your website.

Building your social media presence means being proactive and intentional. Know what you’re trying to achieve – and make life easy for yourself by focusing your resources and attention on fewer social networks and fewer (but higher-quality) posts. You’ll soon start to see results.

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