By Remy Raitt

Media Update has already touched on social media mistakes your brand should avoid and presented a beginners guide to social media and now it’s time to find out how to maximise the benefits the worldwide webs plethora of platforms offer.

Figure out your audience

“It needs to be taken into consideration that there are generally three types of audiences: growth, influencer and effectiveness audiences,” says Breeze Website Design (BWD) account manager Jade Duncan. Growth audiences are those who can increase sales, influencer audiences can play a role in building an organisation’s reputation, perception and credibility, and effectiveness audiences are responsible for delivering on and promoting brand promises.

Pick your platforms

Picking ideal platforms depends heavily on your brand. Founder and CEO of Hashtag South Africa, Conrad David, suggests investigating Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube, SMS campaigns and Slideshare. Duncan says Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram are ideal for millennial-orientated audiences.

“And it’s not just about having a page or profile on these accounts,” David says. “When you begin to lay the foundations to social, remember that you have to be willing to stretch your capabilities across platforms.”

Voluntarily engage your audience

"As we’ve moved into an era where clients have information at their fingertips, more and more companies have woken up to the fact that clients do not want to be advertised to or marketed to in the conventional, invasive manner anymore," says Duncan."They want to be voluntarily engaged. Social media is an ideal tool through which brands can share with their target audiences or speak with them, rather than at them."

She says this is called ‘content marketing’. “For this reason, all the top brands around the globe are including social media as a vital part of their modern marketing mix,” she says.  “Bottom line is, that at some point, there will be a conversation about your company online. Question is whether you’d like to react to it or control it?”

Use social media to pull in revenue

Both Duncan and David stress that social media offers top of mind marketing, emanated in a non-evasive yet frequent stream. “Social media keeps brands in the loop of what customers are saying about their product,” says Duncan. “This means they can align their product development accordingly.”

Timing is everything

“You should strongly consider taking time out to plan a content calendar, understand your objectives, plot expected results and have responses ready for call to actions when comments start flying in,” says David.

He says when it comes to timing posts all one needs to do is think about what people are doing during different times of the day. “A good rule of thumb is to post business oriented content in business hours and content that is aimed at consumers after hours,” says Duncan.

Nailing the post

“People like many pages, so the battle begins and is won by pages with content that stands out from the pack,” says David. Duncan says posts should inspire, move or engage and that employing a communication agency for guidelines would be a wise move.

Both agree that posts should focus on quality over quantity as spamming your followers is a sure fire way to lose favourability.

What are your thoughts? How else could brands maximise outcomes from social media? Tell us below.