Too often, businesses get on social media platforms and just start posting immediately. However, they typically end up not being able to post with any regularity long-term because they’re not sure if the posts are having any effect. The problem? They never figured out what their goals were for social media by knowing what questions to ask about social media.
Before you start posting on social media, or if you’re not liking your current social media plan, take a moment to reflect on some key questions to ask about social media. One of the key questions about social media marketing, for example, is, “What tones should you use when developing content on Instagram and TikTok?” Knowing answers to this and other key questions to ask about social media will ensure that your social media efforts are worth the time you spend creating the posts. Here, we’ve listed 7 questions to ask yourself about what you’re doing on social media beyond, “What tones should you use when developing content on Instagram and TikTok?”
Table of Contents
Questions to Ask About Social Media
- Why have you joined social media?
- What is your brand’s overall purpose?
- What is your brand’s voice?
- Who is your target audience?
- What problems can you help them solve?
- Should you use social media to provide customer service?
- How does the customer get from social media to making a purchase?
Why Have You Joined Social Media?
One of the top questions about social media marketing regards your reason for joining. A lot of times, people and businesses alike join social media just because everyone else is on it. But businesses should always clearly define why they want to be on social media first. Some questions to ask yourself are:
- Do I want to promote brand awareness?
- Do I want to get people to visit our website or store?
- Do I want people to purchase items straight from a shoppable link in the post?
- Do I want people to know about upcoming events or sales?
- Do I want customer testimonials?
- Do I want people to sign up for a newsletter or call?
- Do I want customer feedback on my products or stores?
- Do I want to know more about my customers?
The answers to “What tones should you use when developing content on Instagram and TikTok?” and other questions will be key in ensuring that everything you do on social media fits within your company’s goals.
What Is Your Brand’s Overall Purpose?
Another one of the top questions about social media marketing is “What’s the overall purpose of your business, in a few words?” Is the purpose serious or fun and lighthearted? Once you answer this and questions like “What tones should you use when developing content on Instagram and TikTok?” you can ensure that you are using social media platforms that align with your company’s tone and overall purpose.
If you sell food, we bet it looks good. That means you should focus on Instagram or TikTok, visual social media platforms.
When answering these and other social media marketing questions, if your brand is offering business services, choose less “fun” platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Sure, you can be on other platforms too, but focus most of your efforts on the platform that matches the tone and purpose of your brand.
Remember, you can choose to be on any platform. For example, serious news organizations address serious topics on TikTok. However, they do so in lighthearted ways. A key consideration is that they have much more staff at their disposal, allowing them to spend time on multiple platforms. If you have a big staff, you can post content on every platform. But if you don’t, focus on the one or two that make the most sense.
What Is Your Brand Voice?
A good social media strategy always factors in the company’s voice and tone, making this one of the most important social media marketing questions. The words you use, the pictures you post, the videos you upload, and the emoticons, or lack thereof, have a huge impact on your audience and the way your brand is perceived.
A few great examples are the tones and voice of Geico (funny), the New York Times (educational and serious), the Dollar Shave Club (economical), and Whole Foods (healthy).
To figure out your brand voice, try this exercise. If your brand was a person, how would you describe the personality of someone? How would you describe your competitors’ personalities? Is one of your competitors the class bully? Is it another part of the artsy crowd? How do your brand’s personality traits make you different?
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Some companies can pull from their customer data or market research to figure out the key demographics of their audience. Those include:
- Age
- Education level
- Income
- Gender
- Marital status
- Type and place of residence
Then, these companies can find out which platforms have the most users in their target audience. Younger people skew towards TikTok, for example, while older people use Facebook.
There are also several helpful market research tools that can help with audience insights. As an example, you can check out the Pew Research Center for its annual report on who uses which social media platform the most.
What Problems Can Your Posts Help Them Solve?
Showing off your products isn’t enough. Show how your products or services help your customers solve problems. People want their lives to be easier and tasks to be less time-consuming. Your posts should emphasize the problems and solutions that you, and only you, offer. You likely have competition in your field. Don’t bad mouth them. Instead, show, through video and photos especially, how you beat the competition.
Should You Use Social Media to Provide Customer Service?
To some degree, we can answer this for you. If you have social media pages that are open to the public, customers will inevitably post questions and complaints there. It’s easier for them to write a comment than it is to call or reach out through your website. While you might be tempted to leave those comments alone, you should always respond.
However, if you really want to provide customer service on social media, you need to enable features like Facebook Messenger. It has an auto-assistant option that can handle basic inquiries. You can tell Facebook what to reply to simple questions like, “What’s your return policy?” and “What are your store hours?”
If you don’t want to invest time and money in features like that, you need to decide what to do about negative comments. Don’t delete them because that often backfires on companies. People can take screenshots of what they’ve posted, and if you delete them, you may get accused of covering up issues. It’s called reputation management, and it’s why many companies turn to us at SEO Design Chicago to handle the situation for them.
How Does the Customer Get From Social Media to Making a Purchase?
Ideally, you want your social media profiles to lead people from seeing a post into making a purchase from you. The first way to determine if and how this happens is to learn about and follow analytics. Analytics will tell you how people found your site – whether it was through search terms in Google or if they found you through social media.
If you see everyone coming to your site from Facebook but not TikTok, you’re doing something right with Facebook and should spend more time and money there. A lot of people hire professionals like us at SEO Design Chicago to set up and monitor analytics for them.
These analytics will provide important information suggesting the return on investment (ROI) of your efforts. And keep in mind that investment isn’t just financial. Time is an investment too. In addition, ROI doesn’t necessarily only relate to purchases. People simply checking out your site could have a positive return on investment. Of course, the best ROI leads to purchases.
One way you can lead people to purchase from your social media accounts is to use shoppable links in your posts. There are multiple ways to do this, but the best ways require that you pay some money to social media platforms. We are happy to explain the pros and cons of shoppable links to you if you are interested.
Social Media Content Creation Strategy
Creating social media accounts is the first step in establishing your social media presence, but the real work comes when you create your content strategy and ask yourself social media marketing questions such as, “What tones should you use when developing content on Instagram and TikTok?” A social media content strategy lays out what you will post and how often you will post. The two most significant elements of a content strategy are relevant and consistent content. You cannot have a successful social media presence without either of these, and neglecting one of these elements won’t work either.
If it’s too much for you to handle in-house, SEO Design Chicago can handle the whole process for you.
Relevant content ensures that what you post provides your followers with a better idea of who you are as a company—whether it be an upcoming event, product release, or insight into how you source your products. These allow customers to stay informed and up to date on your business.
At SEO Design Chicago, we have years of experience making social media pay off for businesses. Our social media content creation services help businesses stay relevant with regular posting options on any platform. It’s one thing to have a company Facebook page or Twitter account. Still, the real value is in developing a long-term plan for maintaining and growing those pages to attract the attention of social media users. We provide social media management packages to help your business get the most out of your social media channels.
FAQ:
- What questions should you ask before setting a social media strategy?
- How does your brand’s purpose influence social media strategy?
- Why does ROI matter?
- How do you determine who your target audience is?
- How can you get people to purchase from social media posts?
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