1.Prepare a strategy for your brand's social networks:

Just as you create a business plan for your business or a marketing plan to determine how you are going to communicate, your brand's social networks must also follow a previously thought-out strategy.
A social media strategy is the plan or path you will implement that answers the following questions:

• What do you want to achieve with your brand's social networks: make yourself known, have a more direct communication channel with your customers or simply sell more.
• How are you going to achieve that initial objective: What specific actions are you going to follow on social networks to make more people know you or to generate more sales? Communicate about your product, show the day-to-day life of your company, show other consumers' experience, etc.
• Where will you put your efforts to implement the actions you have outlined: on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, etc.

2. Your ideal customer must be the central axis of your strategy:

The most important thing when creating a strategy is to have your ideal customer at the center of it: age, economic profile, tastes... When you are defining the actions you are going to carry out, you should always have your ideal customer in mind and plan a strategy based on the needs they have. For example, what social networks is my ideal customer on? What type of content does he/she consume most? Is he/she more likely to use digital channels to find out news about my brand? Is he/she approachable or does he/she like to be spoken to seriously?

Your social media strategy must be aligned with your business objectives:

The strategy you create for your social networks should be a reflection of clear communication and marketing. The social networks of a brand are, in the vast majority of cases, the letter of introduction to potential customers and like your store, should reflect one hundred percent of your brand identity. The social networks of your business are an extension of it.
For example: if you do not have the capacity to sell internationally, it is important that your social media strategy is focused on a local audience, which is the only demand you are able to satisfy.

4. Prioritize valuable content over promotional content.

Social media has evolved a lot in recent years and after the pandemic people increasingly prefer valuable content over aspirational or merely promotional content.
Valuable content is any content in which you teach something or solve a problem for your customer. It is no longer enough to promote your product or service, now you must provide relevant information to the consumer.

For example, if you have a skin care brand, share information about routines, care for different skin types, healthy habits, etc. Valuable content is different for each brand and each account, but one recommendation I can give you is to focus on solving problems or even generating emotions with your content. For example, talking about upcoming trends and teaching your followers how to incorporate them with your collection is an excellent way to create valuable content.

This makes all the difference in your brand metrics and is what is going to help you nurture an audience and leverage social media to get sales for your business.

5. Have a personality in social networks:

Another fundamental aspect that I highly recommend to be successful in social networks is to transmit the personality of your brand in order to generate connections with your audience. Social networks were not really designed to sell but to connect people, that is why profiles that are very promotional, not very close or that only show their products, lose relevance in networks. 

My recommendation is to work on your brand tone, the one that feels authentic and is aligned with the brand universe and incorporate it into social media. You don't need to try to be funny or have your whole team on reels, just find what makes your brand unique.

6. Make your brand feel close to the consumer:

Regardless of the tone of your brand, closeness is essential in social networks to connect with your audience.
A good way to give proximity to brands is by showing the production process, showing what a day to day working there is like, a story or anecdote of how the brand name came about, etc.
In the case of brands where the founders and their personal history play an important role, it helps a lot to connect with your audience if they share how they got to where they are.
For example, in the case of Rare Beauty, Selena Gomez's brand, her personal story and her struggle with mental health have been key to developing the company and that's why Selena is always very present on her brand's social media. In addition to promoting the products, she shows the day-to-day life of the company and even the creative process behind the products.

7. Identify the best social networks for your brand:

This is one of the main reasons why many social media strategies fail, and it is because efforts are being dedicated to social networks where the brand's potential customers are not. For example, if your ideal customers are women over 40 years old, it is unlikely that you will find them on Tik Tok, or if you are looking to capture the attention of 18 year olds, your efforts should not be on Linkedin. My recommendation is to define your brand's ideal customer very well and understand in which social networks they may be. This way you can concentrate your efforts there.

8. Adapt your tone to the different social networks.

If in the case of your brand and based on your strategy it makes sense to be on different social networks, it is very important that you adapt your tone and content to each social network. Each one has very different characteristics and the content that works well in one is not the same as the content that works in another.

9. Social networks require immediacy, being up to date with trends is key:

Finally, and the best advice I can give you is that, in order to create content that generates interaction, you must be up to date with trends and understand how they affect your ideal customer. Here I recommend that you understand very well what trends are relevant to join and for that you must be very clear about your brand identity. I also recommend that if you have a team or delegate the creation of content for your networks to an agency, try to reduce content approval times as much as possible. Many brands are not very timely and when they publish content on a trend it is already too late and that topic has lost relevance. That's why I highly recommend that entrepreneurs frequently consume social media content in a strategic way in order to understand where trends are going and if there is a conversation worth joining.