Photo: Fertnig / E+ / Getty Images

Having a successful business and brand takes hard labor, dedication, and excellent work. You might not yet realize it, but having a solid social media presence is equally important in maintaining a successful business. Customers, both existing and potential, want a way to connect with you and your business—and in these times where information is so readily available, it’s crucial to stay connected.

Whether you’ve been in business for decades or are just starting out, creating and maintaining a well-grounded social media presence across platforms helps you to build relationships and showcase your brand’s personality. We have some tips on leveraging social media to help you reach customers and expand your business profile.

Knowing your audience is vital to a successful social media presence. Knowing what they want to read about is significant, but it’s not the only thing that makes up your audience profile. Understanding their demographics, interests, and preferences will guide your content creation and help you engage with your audience effectively and, therefore, will help turn content consumers into paying customers.

Use tools like Facebook Insights and Instagram Insights to learn more about your followers. For example, you can learn about engagement, view time, net followers, audience demographics, and reach, all from viewing your page insights. By tracking these metrics over time, you can see how certain posts impact your following.

Photo: Group4 Studio / E+ / Getty Images

Social media is a two-way street, and engaging with your followers and audience is a great way to build a sense of community and loyalty around your brand. Respond promptly to comments, messages, and mentions to best engage with your followers. Encourage conversations by asking questions, conducting polls, and seeking feedback. You can even ask them what content they want to see to ensure you make the most of your content strategy.

Maintaining a consistent brand image across all your social media platforms is crucial for brand recognition. Using the same profile pictures, cover photos, and color schemes creates a cohesive and recognizable presence. Consistency helps in building trust and making your brand memorable.

While it’s important to post content regularly to keep your social media audience engaged, it’s even more important to publish high-quality content. After all, sharing content that is lackluster or irrelevant to your brand serves little purpose and might even drive away traffic from your page. Focus on delivering value, whether it's informative, entertaining, or inspiring, to resonate with your audience. Quality content encourages engagement and sharing, making your brand and business stand out and be seen by many.

For example, if you're a landscaper, your followers may want to know your top five favorite gravel materials to use. Or, if you’re an electrician, you might want to post about the dangers of homeowners tackling electrical projects themselves. These quality posts will drive traffic and engagement to your page versus generic or unrelated content.

Visuals are an incredibly powerful component on social media platforms. No matter what your business is, there’s almost always a way to turn some aspect of your company’s work into a visual piece of content. You can use high-quality images, videos, infographics, and even GIFs to capture your audience's attention. Even better, video content typically performs best with most algorithms because it captures a viewer's attention for longer. Visual content tends to receive more likes, shares, and comments, helping you reach a wider audience and attracting more customers.

Researching and understanding current trends in your industry and then using them within your content is a great way to boost your visibility and engagement. Consumers like to see “new and now” content, especially when looking for ideas on upgrading their homes.

To do this, make keyword research a priority for your business to see what is popular, keeping in mind that seasonality plays a big role. In addition, learning what content gaps exist in your library of posts can help you determine where you can flex your expertise or perspective.

Since more than 300 million people in the US use social media, it’s important to captivate your audience through your posts. Knowing what not to post on social media is almost just as important as knowing what to post. In a world where social media is the first place many customers look for information before hiring a professional, making a good first impression is essential. Below are some things to stay away from posting on social media:

As fun as that party was or as nice as that selfie looks, it’s best to keep these photos off of your professional social media pages. Posting personal photos can make your business site look unprofessional or even negligent and might turn away potential customers. Instead, keep all images related to your business and brand—opt to post your company’s logo as your profile picture, and keep additional photos to project-related content.

As tempting as it can be to speak negatively about your competitors, you and your company should refrain. Commenting negatively about competitors sheds a negative light on you and your brand, and potential or existing customers might see this as a sign of distrust. Instead of going after your competitors, focus on posts highlighting how your business differs from the competition.

While your language might be colorful off the job site, it’s best to keep your language clean on social media. Off-color word choices might offend existing and potential customers, thus impacting your business. Likewise, being mindful of language that could cause harm to readers is key to keeping customers on your side.

We’ve all been there—you hit publish on a piece of content, only to find out hours (or days) later that it has typos or grammatical errors. On a personal social media page, that’s fine because most people won’t notice or care that much. However, on a professional page that is promoting your business, you want to ensure that every piece of content has been edited thoroughly. Making your content read as knowledgeable and educated only helps give you a good impression to the public.