Reaching your audience through social media can sometimes be challenging, especially when faced with a tremendous amount of noise from competitors and other brands.

Following are four best practices to help increase your chances of reaching your audience while maintaining your brand messaging.

1) Know Your Tweetdecks

If you’ve never used Twitter’s Tweetdeck feature before, I recommend you start. It’s one of the easiest ways to conduct social listening and to really nail down what your audience is talking about. Tweetdecks are especially useful when it comes to establishing relationships with key audience members and influencers, because they allow you to track a specific group of people and save you the hassle of manually filtering your Twitter feed.

Getting your Tweetdeck up and running is easy. Simply identify your target audiences, locate their Twitter handles and add them to your deck. Voila! You’re ready to start listening and monitoring. As previously mentioned, this makes establishing relationships with your audience easier, because it eliminates the noise from everyone else you follow and allows you to hone in on one targeted group, giving you a better idea of the kind of content your audience is engaging with so you can better tailor your messaging.

2) Sharing Is Caring

Sharing content created by your audience furthers your chances of reaching them since this is one of the most direct forms of communication on social. By retweeting or sharing your audience’s content, you’re increasing brand awareness and taking charge instead of waiting for your audience to engage.

This is an important step in establishing brand affinity and securing your brand’s position in your industry, because it proves that you are listening to them and are interested in what they have to say. This is especially important in B2B communications, because it gives your brand a persona, an identity, an opinion and a voice, unlike more formal communications like media alerts and press releases. Social media enables a brand to speak out about something they believe in and show the “human” side of a company.

3) Call to Action (CTA)

Your audience isn’t always going to know what to do with your content, so give them some direction. If you want them to visit your website or download your company’s most recent eBook, put that in the post.

There are a variety of CTAs that your brand can use. Some may be as simple as “share our latest blog post.” Others can be more involved, such as “contact us today to learn about our most recent offers” or “reserve your spot for our next webinar before it fills up.” The last CTA is one of my favorites because it communicates a sense of urgency and encourages people to make an immediate decision.

Want to see a CTA in the wild? Learn how we’re using social media to engage audiences and attract new ones by visiting https://bospar.com/services/

4) Analytics

One of the easiest ways to learn about your audience is to monitor your analytics. By doing so, you’re able to see what messaging is working and what your audience is most interested in.

Knowing what’s working and what’s not are essential to optimizing your reach. Why waste time on ineffective messaging when you can be re-creating the stuff that works?

Incorporate these tactics into your daily monitoring to better understand your audience and to use your time wisely when preparing content. In doing so, you’ll maximize your return and impress your clients!