The online landscape is constantly changing, especially when it comes to social media. It can be difficult to ensure your content is reaching your audience with this everchanging landscape. Achieving success online becomes even more tricky when social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, avoid sharing the details of their complex algorithms with the public. This often leaves creators scratching their heads when their high-quality, audience-centered content only receives a few interactions online.
Tips and Tricks for Staying Relevant in the Algorithm
While no one can know all the ins and outs of social media algorithms, some tips and tricks can help you increase your engagement and visibility online:
- Optimize your profile: Ensure all your information is clear and up to date. You will want to have relevant information, like your hours of operation, address for physical locations, and contact information. You can also set up action buttons to drive customers to interact with your business. Learn how to do this here.
- Include ALL relevant information in the photo/graphic and caption: Make sure to share all relevant information (think event dates, times, locations, etc.)
- Geotag your posts: When creating a post, set your location. This will help potential customers in your area find you and your page.
- Use relevant hashtags: Instagram’s hashtag pages allow customers to browse content that is relevant or interesting to them. Using local hashtags helps put your content in front of your audience.
- Collaborate with partners: Think of other accounts and profiles that you can partner and collaborate with. Tagging these accounts and cross sharing each other’s content will grow your audience.
- Boost content: Don’t be afraid to invest in your content. You can boost posts on social media to have them prioritized in your audience’s feed.
- Post Frequently and Consistently: Posting quality content frequently and consistently is a great way to stay at the top of your audience’s mind and feed!
Best Practices for Showing Up Online
CREE has recently conducted case study research with agriculture-based businesses located in Florida that have been successful in digital marketing. We examined these agribusinesses’ social media presence and conducted interviews with the business owners to determine elements of their digital marketing that are key to their success. This study produced eight best practices for marketing agribusinesses online:
- Find a niche market: Take the time to decide what makes you unique and how you can share that with your audience online.
- Start with a small investment in social media and increase over time: Look over your financial and time budget to decide how much of your resources you can designate to social media. Consider starting out small and increasing your investment over time.
- Integrate online strategy with traditional methods (e.g. flyers, community involvement, radio):The saying, “Never put all of your eggs in one basket,” applies here too!
- Be adventurous and try a new online marketing strategy to see if it works: Try something new that is out of your comfort zone or that you have not seen done before. It might just be the thing to go viral!
- Keep good records to know what works and what doesn’t: Setting appropriate goals and reviewing what worked and what did not work is a great way to make progress.
- Discontinue practices that are not making a return: Always be willing to tweak your strategy. Keep doing the things that are working and try something new if things aren’t working.
- Conduct informal market research: Informal market research involves gathering evidence through informal methods, such as drawing on your observations or prior experiences, having conversations with other online users and creators, or doing an internet search. This research process will help you determine your customers’ preferences for online sales and marketing.
- Take time for yourself away from the digital world to refresh: No seriously, we mean it!
If you are looking for more resources related to selling online check out our Touchless Transactions Toolkit and our How to Market in a Digital Era Toolkit.
And finally, always remember to give yourself some grace while figuring things out. If you have success stories (or unsuccessful stories), please share the marketing strategies that you have found to be successful (or unsuccessful) for you and your business/organization right now in the comments! We look forward to hearing from you.