Mosh Social Media’s new 2021 New Zealand Facebook and Instagram Report has revealed the retail social strategies behind top Kiwi brands. Here, Mosh Co-Founder Jon Randles gives his top tips on how Kiwi SME’s can enhance their own social media to reach new and engaged audiences.
It can be easy to think of social media marketing as an afterthought when you’re running a business. The day-to-day can easily get in the way of regular content creation and scheduling.
However, pushing social media to the side can put retailers on the back foot. Nowadays, audiences of all demographics are sitting and consuming content on social platforms. In fact, according to our Mosh report, social media attracted over 110,000 new Kiwi users in 2020.
That took the total number of New Zealanders with active social media accounts to 3.97 million — a whopping 82 percent of the entire population aged 16 to 64.
Findings also showed the number one reason people follow a brand on social media isn’t just for entertainment, but to learn about products and services. In addition, 170,000 more online purchases were made in 2020, with 71 percent of Kiwis now shopping online.
Your social media marketing is now the best way to reach engaged audiences who are already on the path to purchase. However, there are still many retailers out there who don’t realise the consequences of having a poor social media strategy.
Social media can eat up a lot of your time very quickly. We all know how quickly an evening mindlessly scrolling on your phone can disappear, the same can happen with social media marketing. If you’re not super clear on the what, why, and how before you start, you will waste your time and money.
Yet we know reviving and staying on top of your social media can be daunting, so here are our top tips to supercharge your social media:
- Know your audience: Speak to them in ways they want to be spoken to. Find out who your shopper demographics are on social media and how they use their apps. Are they more frequent in the mornings or evenings, do they prefer static or video content? Find out and play to your audience.
- Boost it: Back your content with investments and target the demographics and geographies the content is for. Even small boosting budgets will see your posts be prioritised by pay-to-play algorithms across Facebook and Instagram.
- Targeting is Key: Make sure you’re looking at who and where your paid posts are going. There is no excuse these days with the tools available to just blast your content to everybody and anybody.
- Post regularly and consistently: Pretty self-explanatory, don’t take a large hiatus from your socials. Even one simple story or post a week will keep your engagement up - a key priority in this type of marketing.
- Make sure it looks good: But not too good so it looks too slick and skippable. Ideally, your content will have personality and be authentic to your brand.
- Do Giveaways: People love free stuff and you want to get products into people’s hands. However, make sure you’re checking the T&Cs for each platform before posting a giveaway. There are rules, you want to stay on the right side of them. For example, asking people to ‘Share’ on Facebook to enter a competition breaches their promotion rules. Google ‘Facebook Promotion Policies’, it’s the first result.
- Plan ahead: Planning ahead saves a lot of time and is overall much more efficient, and will make your brand’s content effortless the more you get into the habit of doing it.
- Have fun with it: Social media should be taken seriously, but don't worry about being too polished and don't make it look like an ad. Relax and be authentic to your audience, because users can sense a lack of authenticity from brands a mile away.
The world of social media marketing can look daunting, but having a good social content strategy will greatly benefit your business in the long run. Retailers, large and small, now need a real understanding of their audience, and then from there to understand the tools that they have at their disposal to be able to target these audiences.
By making an effort to know your audience and talk to them authentically and honestly you can really start to optimise results across your social media platforms.
If you’re looking to further enhance your business’ social media strategy Mosh runs training for SMEs that can give you the tools and knowledge to get started. Contact Jon@mosh.co.nz for more information, or visit mosh.co.nz and click ‘Training’.
