As you embark upon your plans to eat better, drink less, exercise more, spend more time with family or save more money, consider how you’ll be a better inbound marketer in 2018 with these simple social media resolutions for your new year.
1. Make 2018 the Year to Understand Your Audience
When you're attracting followers and developing content, consider your buyer persona and perhaps the circle of people just beyond that persona.
Casting a broad net might garner you a lot of followers, but are they likely to buy your products and services? Quantity over quality isn’t what it used to be, considering that anyone can buy Facebook or Instagram followers.
The truth of the matter is that the number of likes or the number of followers you have doesn’t necessarily equate with any type of ROI. Are the likes coming from an audience that might buy your product or are they simply indifferent and happened to chuckle at that particular piece of content?
What you ultimately want your audience to do is convert — and if they aren’t, you should probably overhaul your social strategy.
Start by conducting a social media audit and move on to resolution #2 as they go hand in hand.
2. Offer More Value
In the B2B space, it’s more beneficial to spend less time producing big volumes of content and, instead, focus on creating better content that will provide value or solve a problem for your audience.
This is at the heart of the inbound marketing philosophy, and if you aren’t embodying that ideal in your content development, start fresh in 2018.
Be helpful and informative.
Don’t talk at your customers; instead, be part of the larger conversation, both in your content and your response to other people’s content.
Along with offering more value to your customers, you should also strive to...
3. Be More Consistent
Just because you've resolved to create better content doesn’t mean you can get sloppy with how often you post it.
Let 2018 be the year when you resolve to be better at managing your social media calendar, prioritizing your best posts, and making sure you leave room for more spontaneous possibilities.
Hubspot Product Manager Daria Marmer breaks down how often and the best times to post in this article. But don’t just rely on her words. Dig into resolution #4, too.
4. Do More A/B Testing
All the learning you could do on the best times and types of content to post won’t matter an iota if you aren’t paying attention to your audience as it shifts and changes, or if the social networks decide to futz with their algorithms (which is more likely than not over the course of a year).
Do a deeper dive in 2018, testing your CTAs, your imagery styles, your content offerings. The folks over at AdParlor have laid out a pretty good explanation on how to do that, and while the article is geared toward social ads, you can use the same methodology on your organic posts, too.
Then learn from your social tests by reporting on their effectiveness.
5. Be Thoughtful
No one likes a salesperson bombarding them with advertisements or pleas to buy a product.
Your tone makes a difference — when you're too forceful or assuming, people take it for pushiness.
Be thoughtful about the memes you publish, especially in the B2B space. They’re great for a humorous break, when well placed and timed, but when you're dealing with professionals who are looking to you for value and information, too many memes can come across as lacking industry authority or seriousness about what you offer.
In 2016, Sprout Social found that too many advertisements and using slang and jargon are the top offenders — something that's more than likely still the case in 2017.
This year, vow not to be on the annoying side of the social fence.
6. Learn to Turn Off or Unplug
2017 was a tough year for social media professionals who couldn't easily avoid the overwhelming news from all fronts.
Choose the hours in which you work on social. Don’t read Twitter before going to sleep. Turn off your personal Facebook for a spell. Leave your phone far away from the dinner table.
Whatever turning off or unplugging might mean to you, resolve to give yourself some peace from the little electronic box that we carry around with us everywhere we go. Learn to live in the moment sometimes, without recording it, and without relying on virtual validation.
What social media resolutions are you going to make this year?
