Sometimes, it’s hard for us to make social media work for our brands and businesses.

You’re not alone when you feel like all of your work is for nothing.

You might even think that you’re wasting your time because of the zero results!

I’m here to tell you that you’re not wasting your time, but you might need to change your social media strategy altogether.

Anyone can make social media work for their brand if they do a few different things, and, in this article, I want to show you what to do and how to do it in 3 easy steps.

STEP 1: Consistency Will Make Social Media Work for Your Brand

Like with anything, consistency is essential to help keep viewers on your content.

Social media is no different.

You have to consistently be active on social media for it to aid your brand or business.

Whether you post once a day or ten times a day, you need to remain consistent.

If you post once one day and then three times two days later, search engines or even your audience will not know what your posting schedule is like. It may turn them away from actively checking out your social pages. It would help if you got search engines and your followers used to when you deliver new content for them to see.

One great tool to remain consistent if you have time management issues is scheduling suites. I use Buffer, and for under $10 a month, it does me well for maintaining consistency when I can’t make it happen on my own.

Be consistent about when you post and how often you post, and you’ll start to see a significant increase in your social following.

STEP 2: Post Natively on Social Media Pages

Intelligent people run social media platforms.

That’s why they’re so large. They know how to manage these platforms and adjust the algorithms to make their platforms so huge.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have adjusted their internal system to put less weight on external links.

So, if you’re promoting your website, YouTube channel, blog, or other external links on a social networking platform – something tells me that you’re not getting a lot of conversions from it. This is because the platform is putting less weight on all external links.

They do this to keep people on their platform, clicking their ads because that is how these social media giants stay online and make their money. If everyone left the platform, they wouldn’t make money, and they wouldn’t be able to remain online.

So internal content gets more weight. With that being said, you should post significantly more native content than external.

Upload videos and photos to that social platform instead of linking from another off-site source.

Create content specific to that platform.

Follow the 80/20 rule in social media marketing! 80% native content and 20% non-native content. Native in internal content. Non-native is external links.

Start posting more native content to make social media work for your brand or business.

STEP 3: Build Communities to Make Social Media Work for Brand

If you want social media to work for your brand or business, you will see each one as its community.

You should reserve your brand’s name on each social profile of the most popular platforms, even if you’re not actively using them. That will help prevent impersonation and be available if you wish to be active on a network eventually.

But it would help if you trod lightly where you wish to be active.

To make social media work for your brand, you need to treat it like its own community or a secondary brand!

Really!

You need to be active on it as if it is your only community. Post frequently and post native content that is exclusive to your social page. Run competitions, paid ads, special offers, and more specifically for a social platform, and don’t run the same things on another platform.

I tell you only to choose a few social platforms when first starting because the ones you choose should get your full attention. If you’re managing a lot, it will be overwhelming for you to keep up with.

Turn each social page into its own community, and you’ll see so many activity boosts and increased followers that it will blow your mind.

It is that simple to make social media work for your brand. Those three steps above are all it will take to start seeing some pretty quick results. If you have enjoyed reading this article, do me a favor and share it with someone who would also enjoy reading it.

About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers that follow this blog. Shawn also offers a variety of services for extra help in the area of content creation, blogging, forums, and digital marketing.