According to the survey report by The Manifest, 74% of people now follow brands on social media and 96% of those who do follow brands also interact with them on social platforms. This makes them 57.5% more likely to purchase from a brand that they follow. 

With a total of 3.5 billion users on social media, the necessity of social media for business growth cannot be overemphasised. It simply means that most of your customers are online and using social media every day. 

Have a look at these tips below to build an audience that will help you grow online in 2020. 

Perhaps the most clichéd of all, but the fact of the matter is that the demographics are constantly changing. Your customers are not who they were yesterday.  
 
This means your social media strategy needs to be dynamic enough to serve different audiences. Understanding your audience is of key importance before you begin to market on social media. 

While finding and keeping customers is a challenging task, it’s equally important to maintain and build relationships with existing customers. 

Any missing opportunities and/or poor customer experiences can spread through your clientele like wildfire which can, in some cases, cost you the business you’ve so tirelessly worked hard to build. 

These missed opportunities are especially dangerous if you’re not active and engaging on social media.  

I cannot stress enough on this: The goal of your social media plan should never be to simply bulk on post and stories. You need to publish content to drive awareness, reach and overall brand awareness. But it doesn’t stop there! The further down you get in the funnel, the more important it is to respond and create great relationships with your customers.  

Remember, being too promotional is the number one reason consumers will actually #unfollow you on social media. Not only that, if social media (not just publishing and promoting but actual engagement) is done right the number of users willing to buy from you will go through the roof! 

Create SMART goals and you’ll have a solid understanding of your audience - their likes, dislikes, wants and desires. 

Most of the time when working in small businesses, you’re so busy wearing many hats that you forget a very crucial step of checking out your competition. Look over and have a peek at their posting schedule, the types of posts they create (sometimes, the competition has the best content you can use to inspire and learn from) and develop a strategy that works around that. 

A picture is worth 1,000 words! Use great visuals to tell a story about your brand and around your product. There are several free graphic design tools like Canva, PicMonkey, and Stencil to help get your creativity flowing! 

This goes for videos too! Video content is an amazing way to increase engagement on social channels, but creating videos can be intimidating (location, stage fright, editing and after effects, etc.) 
 
Take baby steps here, keep it short, write a script and always edit your videos for different platform requirements. 

If your messages are not getting the desired views and impressions, I’d recommend putting a few paid pounds between them to give them a boost. 

Paid ads are one of the quickest and most effective ways to connect with your audiences. Social Ads are an incredibly profitable and versatile advertising channel that give you the ability to build specific campaigns on social media to meet a selection of different business goals at relatively low costs. 

Optimisation is the key to success of any strategy in business. Conduct A/B tests for posts and ads. Conduct focus group studies, compare images, texts, layout, etc. See what has worked in the past and will work in the future. 

Social Media is one of the best ways to connect with your customers. Once you know your audience, you can begin to measure the data against the demographics to hone in on your customers even more.