5 totally awesome social media hacks for businesses

Understand your target audience

If you don’t know who you’re talking to, there is no point in talking. Do you know what they like? How they like to communicate? What they like to eat? To wear? To watch? Do in their leisure time? Read? Having these seemingly random answers can go miles and miles to getting and keeping followers.

Retail giant, Target, has figured out the nitty gritty of their ideal customers and parlayed that knowledge into a massively popular Pinterest account. Their boards and pins cover all their customer bases while linking back to their products. They also include customer posts to further connect and humanize their brand.

Hack #1 – Every consumer has needs, wishes, desires, dreams, goals, and the like. While all this is great, it is their needs that brands need to focus on. If you know your customers inside and out, then you’ve got their needs covered.

Engage your followers

Customers don’t just want to know what your brand is doing, they want to know what each other is doing as well, especially if it involves followers interacting with your products. Depop, often promoted as ‘part Instagram, part eBay’, is a social app that allows patrons to buy and sell re-worn fashion items. Depop relies heavily on user generated content, with paid and influencer marketing sprinkled on top.

Depop’s social media strategy is obviously hitting the right chord because it has amassed 15 million users and growing. In doing so, they’ve created a tight community who follows their every move and stays engaged with the brand and each other.

Hack #2 – Spend time engaging with your followers and allowing them to become part of your brand. This opens lines of dialogue that allow you to strengthen your brand identity and make customers feel a part of your brand’s world.

Create epic content

When you look up the word (two words?) Merriam-Webster in its own self-appointed dictionary, it should say “King of Epic Content”. Merriam-Webster, or MW if you’re trendy, has conquered Twitter with one million followers and counting. Yes, you read that right, a dictionary has over a million followers. Why? Because they create unique, timely, and hilarious content that keeps followers coming back for more. Daily in fact, with their ‘word of the day’ that often has a snarky spin.

Quizzes, current event posts, and other delightful content puts the 100-year-old company in high social media demand. They also score an A+ for consistency, never missing a day to post. Merriam-Webster knows the truth. If your brand doesn’t keep talking, neither will your customers.

Hack #3 – Make sure your brand voice engages, delights, informs, and more importantly deftly communicates your message. Think outside of the box and create masterful content that gives followers a reason to keep coming back for more.

Think laterally

Do as Fender does. Fender Guitars has made a wide sweep of social media by creating lateral accounts on the same channel for each of its company’s arms. Or necks as the case may be. Their main Instagram channel, @fender, has 3.6 million followers and is strictly ‘guitar’ with a capital G. The wisdom of their lateral accounts is that they cover the other elements of Fender also.

With the tagline “Fender’s finest is the world’s finest”, @fendercustomshop highlights Fender’s custom shop based within their headquarters, while their online learning app @fenderplay, takes followers through simple lessons. The Fender brand isn’t just ‘selling’ but providing helpful information to entice possible customers.

Hack #4 – If your brand has several components, take a giant horizontal leap and create multiple social accounts. This stretches your brand into the minds of new followers, brings attention to additional products or services, as well as helps you cross promote.

Go viral

Most clips that go viral on social media have very little control over the outcome, but when you go viral for good reasons its easier for brands to control the narrative. Men’s shaving brand, Gillette, launched a semi-promotional video in 2019 based off the #MeToo movement showing a more modern, socially aware version of manhood. It focused on positive masculinity and how men can make a difference in this world just by stepping up. The video achieved over 30 million views while the #GilletteAd hashtag reached 150 million people. Gillette understood that their past advertising was part of the problem when it came to toxic masculinity and was willing to show change.

Hack #5 – Don’t be afraid to show vulnerability and the willingness to change for the better. People react to emotions, so put a bit of emotion in your socials to make deeper connections.

While these five hacks don’t cover all of the bases when it comes to retaining followers on social media, they do make powerful impacts when used with intention and strategy. Be bold, be transparent, and yes, even sometimes funny. Just be you and followers will respond in kind.

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