Top 10 Ways to Build Your Social Media Presence In 2024

Whether you’re setting up a small business or running a multinational corporation, a strong social media presence is vital for connecting with potential customers.

An integral aspect of business growth and marketing strategies, social media platforms are essential resources for achieving success.

We’ve outlined 10 ways to develop an effective social media presence to help you create content designed to drive lead generation to your business.

What Is Social Media Presence?

Social media presence refers to how you present yourself on social media platforms, whether as an individual, small business owner, or a corporate entity.

It can encompass everything from your hobbies and interests to your professional skills or the company’s products and services.

As such, a social media presence is vital for promoting brand awareness to potential customers and giving you a competitive edge over your business rivals.

Building a robust social media presence is a core component of marketing and promotion, driving sales through ad campaigns and other strategies.

Since social media reaches a global audience, companies can maximize their online impact 24/7 for optimal results.

On a smaller scale, setting up a social media presence can help land job opportunities and promote freelancer services to potential clients.

A social media presence builds trust and credibility, which is necessary for success to flourish, by fostering relationships with followers through engaging content.

Why A Strong Social Media Presence Matters

With the modern world deeply invested in the online world, a strong social media presence offers an important bridge between businesses and their prospective customers.

Organizations and individuals who embrace the online era can instantly access millions of users and directly engage them in conversation.

Let’s examine some of the reasons why you should build a strong social media presence and how doing so can yield significant benefits.

• Presenting your brand’s story. With thousands of businesses competing for attention online, a social media presence ensures your brand gets to be a part of the conversation. It can be used to identify what sets your products and services apart from the competition and establish your brand as one that offers unique value.
• Fostering business development. The best scalable business ideas require access to new markets to grow, which social media platforms’ global reach provides. A social media presence is a powerful tool for generating new leads through performance analytics and other metrics.
• Enhancing social proof and engagement. While traditional advertising is a one-way street, social media marketing channels allow for ongoing conversations and feedback from customers. This helps business owners to engage with their target audience and build customer loyalty through meaningful relationships.
• Flexible marketing strategies. A social media presence presents businesses with a dynamic selection of marketing avenues to explore, blending paid advertisements with affiliate marketing and influencer collaborations. Powerful analytics tools deliver precise insights into performance that maximize the impact of a marketing budget.
• Understanding industry trends. Social media platforms such as X, Instagram, and TikTok are increasingly important as sources of news, making them vital for business owners to stay on top of industry trends. They are also important resources for competitor analysis and the preferences of consumers looking for related products and services.

While the tactics used to leverage a social media presence will vary depending on its specific goals, the advantages it offers are universal.

10 Ways To Build A Strong Social Media Presence

While building an effective social media presence has many advantages, achieving this success requires planning and implementing a clear strategy.

Let’s dive into the various ways you can accomplish this, from understanding how the various social media platforms function to gathering audience insights.

1. Research Your Competitors & Audience

Conducting thorough research into business competitors has been significant since well before the advent of the Internet.

In the contemporary digital landscape, this process has been made easier thanks to the abundance of readily available information companies host online.

Competitor brand analysis can be performed on a range of metrics, from gathering raw data about their sales and online reach to checking customer satisfaction.

On the macro level, this research can incorporate broad trends related to your business’s industry and any market segmentation of note.

This can then be paired with direct competitor analysis based on specific rival companies, assessing their social media presence and core audience.

Once this process has been undertaken, you can research your target audience and gain a clear view of how the competition approaches them.

This begins with an understanding of the core demographics, such as gender, age, and location, as well as their purchasing and lifestyle habits.

By building up a profile of your ideal customers based on competitor research, you can then refine your goals and strategies to optimize engagement.

2. Determine Your Goals

Once you’ve completed your competitor and audience research, you can take these findings and use them to determine your social media goals.

This includes everything from establishing your brand identity to developing a tone for your messaging that appeals to the target audience.

These can then be articulated in a clear plan of action that covers short- and long-term goals designed to increase the reach and impact of your social media presence.

You can also consider using SMART goals to help with the process and break down your overall strategy into more manageable components.

Depending on your goals, you’ll need to set up profiles on various social media channels, introducing your branding elements and other information.

Understanding the demographics and user habits of the various platforms can help you focus on those that best suit your business goals.

Here’s a brief overview of each major social media channel and how they can be used to enhance your social media presence:

• Facebook. One of the oldest social media channels, Facebook reaches billions of global users with an emphasis on millennials. With a format combining images with text, it’s a popular platform for e-commerce and retail businesses.
• X (formerly Twitter). While X reaches a similar demographic as Facebook, it favors short adverts with eye-catching imagery. Businesses in the fields of media and entertainment, technology, and sports dominate the platform.
• Instagram. With a huge combined audience of Gen Z and millennials, Instagram is optimal for vibrant and colorful visual content to promote brand reputation and awareness. Promotions for lifestyle-related products and services can directly reach their target audience on this platform.
• TikTok. Skewing toward a younger audience and with an emphasis on short-form videos, TikTok’s lighthearted approach to content focuses on storytelling. This makes it ideal for products and services that match its casual and fun presentation style.

You may also need to set up a business or personal website and use your social media content to drive traffic and direct sales to your customers.

Setting up a clear website design timeline will help you achieve this goal and is vital if you’re considering integrating content marketing into your strategy.

This will also help you to choose the best social media presence for your goals and develop an effective content and marketing strategy.

3. Create A Content Strategy

A content strategy presents a clear articulation of how you plan to achieve your business goals through your social media presence.

It begins by assessing your current social media presence and auditing your content to determine what works well and what needs improvement.

This audit will help you to create content that fits into a broader social media strategy and put together a posting schedule and marketing campaign.

If you’re establishing a new company, you can start by writing a brand manifesto to clarify to potential customers what you have to offer.

This can be shared through social media posts using targeted campaigns, along with additional content to encourage customers to actively engage with the brand.

As we’ve outlined above, different platforms are optimized for different types of content, and your strategy will be informed by the social platforms you’re using.

Here are some content formats you can incorporate into your overall strategy:

• Short—and long-form videos. Video content is a great way to present dynamic visual content to your audience and explain how your products or services meet consumers’ demands.
• Static images, GIFs, and memes. For those with a shorter attention span, images, animated GIFs, and memes are an effective format for instantly communicating concepts at a glance.
• Live videos. While live videos are less commonly used, they allow businesses to engage directly with customers and gather valuable insights into what they’re looking for as consumers.
• Text content. If you need to describe your business in more detail, you can send text descriptions to your X and Facebook followers and encourage responses in the comment section.
• User–generated content. Sharing content created by happy customers is an effective way to bring social media users directly into the conversation and improve your brand visibility.

This content can then be used to drive website traffic to your sales funnel using a clear, search-engine-optimized content calendar.

You can then use these assets as part of your marketing and promotion initiatives, from paying for social ads to building connections with brand ambassadors.

4. Market Your Social Media Presence

Marketing your social media presence can be achieved through a variety of processes that cater to all types of businesses and budget ranges.

There’s no limit on what marketing strategies you can adopt, and as you gather data, you can refine your campaigns to optimize results.

Here are some of the core marketing strategies you can apply to your social media accounts to reach out to your target market.

Running Contests & Giveaways

An affordable method for promotion is running contests and giveaways and sharing the promotion on multiple platforms to reach more potential customers.

This tactic can also help promote your brand voice and develop a strong presence in online communities that are interested in what you offer.

Traditional Paid Advertising

Running paid ads is another popular way to get your brand into the social media feeds of potential customers already interested in your products.

Platforms such as Facebook deliver powerful analytics tools for monitoring your ad performance and directly engaging with your followers.

Affiliate marketing

Whether you’re launching a clothing brand or a new mobile application, there are thousands of affiliate programs to help you reach your audience.

Affiliate programs can help your brand stand out from the competition by directly reaching a large audience through an established

Businesses can distribute marketing budgets across social media content on some or all of these options, determining the right platforms for their audience.

As the company grows and revenue increases, additional funds can then be allocated toward marketing initiatives that highlight the brand’s personality.

5. Build A Community

Fostering relationships with customers is another core strategy deeply woven into a strong social media presence.

Each social media platform has the option for followers to engage directly with your posts to provide feedback and insights into your brand.

Posting regularly, whether it’s updates on your products and services or inspiring stories, is an effective way to instigate these conversations and build a community.

Likewise, setting up forums and other online communities where your followers can converse can further encourage this sense of engagement.

Some of the main social media platforms have infrastructures in place for these communities, such as Facebook groups and pages.

They can also be used to handle customer support issues in real time, providing a platform for direct feedback and a transparent public response to concerns.

If you use a business website, you can create a blog post checklist that covers important topics related to your business’s industry niche.

This engaging content can further enhance a sense of community and also offer valuable insights into what customers are looking for.

6. Partner With Influencers

One of the most popular social media strategy methods in the modern digital landscape is partnerships with influencers to reach a larger target audience.

Influencer marketing represents the collaboration between brands and social media accounts that promote their products and services.

A relatively recent phenomenon, influencer marketing has exploded in recent years, doubling in size since 2019 and reaching billions of people worldwide.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that the leading international brands have all embraced influencer marketing and enjoyed the positive return on investment it provides.

With that said, smaller businesses can also take advantage of the influencer format, provided they have something unique and enticing to offer.

This makes it a viable marketing resource for people experimenting with side hustles to pay off debt who can persuade influencers to join the cause.

While celebrity influencers can charge millions of dollars for brand collaborations, many smaller accounts work for affordable rates.

Typically, influencers take a flat rate for their services, referred to as a brand deal, and then post about the product or service to their audience.

Whether looking for mom influencers on Instagram or technical experts on X, the concept offers great potential for expanding your online reach.

7. Follow Industry Trends

Just as conducting competitor research is vital for laying the groundwork, following industry trends should also be an ongoing process.

Understanding how social networks evolve in an ever-changing and fluid online environment is essential for adapting to new changes as soon as possible.

This is as important for monitoring industry trends related to your business model as it is for optimizing and refining your social media strategy.

Some of the primary social media trends you can incorporate into your processes include:

• Keeping on top of the best practices that each social platform prioritizes as part of its internal algorithms, such as video length and volume of text.
• Updates relating to search engine optimization and the use of keywords and formatting to improve your content’s visibility to your target audience.
• Humanizing your content strategy to avoid coming across as impersonal and corporate, sharing personal stories and experiences.
• Understanding content marketing trends, such as the pros and cons of blogging and how you can drive traffic from the right platforms.
• Staying abreast of the latest trending hashtags on X, Facebook, and Instagram, and piggybacking on these trends to draw attention to your brand.
• Integrating new data analytic tools and processes to improve insights into your brand’s personality and how to improve your social posts.

This process can help you update your editorial calendar on the fly, capitalize on newsworthy or cultural trends, and achieve a prominent position on social media platforms.

8. Monetize Your Content

While social media is an important resource for promoting your brand voice, products, and services, it’s also a potential source of revenue.

The best way to achieve this is by setting up a website and driving traffic from your social media pages to increase sales and develop loyal customers.

Established companies are likely to have a website already, but if you’re setting up a new business, it can be achieved on a surprisingly low budget.

Likewise, individuals and freelancers looking to generate leads don’t have to spend a fortune to get a professional website up and running.

You can do this by choosing a website builder that allows you to easily set up a site without any web development or design experience necessary.

Website builders offer a complete service that allows you to build your site from the ground up and connect it directly to your social channels.

Here are some of the key features of a website builder you need to consider before investing in a platform:

• Easy-to-use templates. Website builder templates cater to all types of businesses and provide an instant layout that can be easily tailored to your business’s requirements.
• Drag-and-drop user interface. Most website builders use an intuitive user interface that allows for videos, images, and other assets to be dropped onto the page and arranged for a pleasing presentation.
• Content management systems. As your website grows over time, a content management system can help you manage your assets and stay organized.
• E-commerce functionality. The best website builders incorporate fully functional e-commerce capabilities into the platform, with full support for major payment processing such as Visa and PayPal.
• Analytics tools. Tracking your site’s performance, updating content for search engine optimization, and monitoring store sales can all be achieved through a website builder.

As your business grows and your social media strategy evolves, you can further refine your website to optimize performance and results.

9. Monitor Your Social Media Analytics

Just as a great website builder allows you to monitor your site’s analytics, so too do social media channels offer users powerful data analytics tools.

Additionally, there are plenty of great tools developed by third parties that can be used to assess the impact of your social media strategy.

One example is Social Blade, which delivers real-time data on the performance of high-profile YouTube content creators, ranging from video views to subscriber counts.

Additional web-based analytics tools such as Google Analytics can also be used to understand better how your content compares to competitors.

While some of these tools are free, there are other paid options that can be used to analyze performance and tailor marketing strategies accordingly.

There are also many excellent tools for freelancers that complement these analytical tools and can help them save valuable time on social media processes.

For example, Hootsuite is a powerful short—and long-term posting schedule with its own set of insights to analyze.

Since many of these analytical tools offer free versions or trial periods, you can give them a try before deciding if they warrant further investment.

10. Experiment With New Content

Whether you’re developing a new small business idea or expanding an established brand, experimenting with new content is a must.

Thanks to the aforementioned analytical tools, such experiments can be accurately monitored and assessed to understand their positive impact.

A popular method used for such experiments is through A/B testing, in which a single variable is changed to see how it affects performance metrics.

For example, businesses can run two promotions in tandem, using the same text content for each one but switching up the associated image.

You can also try multivariable testing, such as comparing media formats across two different platforms or applying different calls to action.

These experiments work best when they are carried out with carefully defined metrics and controllable variables that can be accurately measured.

Once the results of the experiment are available, they can be used to inform future social media posts and campaigns and promote further growth.

Summary

Creating and maintaining a social media presence is a continually evolving process that is influenced by industry trends and in-depth analytics.

By building on the tips explored in this article, individuals and business owners can leverage their social accounts to seek relationships and boost sales.

As artificial intelligence and new tools emerge, you can refine your social media account strategy to produce quality content that appeals to your audience.