You were crushing social media growth but then decided to take a break from posting on social media. And now, you want back in the game. But your page impressions and engagements have gone downhill. The deal with social media is that you can’t take a break and simply pick up where you left off. Social media demands consistency, and a few months’ break would require you to do some heavy lifting so you can rebuild your social media presence.
What does this entail? This blog gives you actionable steps that will help build a social media presence after a hiatus.
1. Audit Your Profile
Don’t rush to start posting. Now that you get a chance to rebuild your social media profile, you can make use of the data you already have and learn from what worked and what didn’t. Conduct a thorough audit of your existing profile. Here’s what you should do:
- Update your profile: Upload a new profile image or banner, write a new bio that aligns with the profile and update the About section.
- Clean up your posts/content: Look at your posts carefully and remove any outdated or irrelevant content. Also, update captions of posts that need a re-work.
- Review profile settings: Social platforms tweak their privacy and visibility settings periodically. So, when you’re back online after a break, be sure to review and update settings on who can discover your profile, who can follow you, and who can engage with you. This is particularly important if the nature of your business or the kind of content you’ll be posting in the future changes.
- Spend time on competitor analysis: The market and trends might have changed during the time you were away. Before you start posting again, run a competitive social media analysis and look at what your competitors are up to, and gather insights on what might work for you.
2. Create a Content Strategy
“Putting tactics before strategy is the noise before defeat,” said Sun Tzu in The Art of War. It’s also true for creating your social media presence. A content strategy is the centrepiece that keeps everything else in check. It involves the following steps:
- Identify your goal: Rebuilding a social presence is in some ways starting afresh. Why are you rebuilding your social profile? Is it for the likes or leads? Is it for the followers or clients? Get a clear idea.
- Analyze metrics: Make a note of the posts that have performed well in the past. Use insights from past engagements to plan your content strategy.
- Know your audience: Understand your target audience's interests, preferences, and pain points. Stand in their shoes and consume content as they do.
- Create content pillars: Now you know what kind of content your audience needs, list down a few topics (pillars) relevant to your audience and your expertise.
- Develop a content calendar: Have a detailed calendar for when and where you will publish your content. This would ideally include reposting evergreen content that did well, along with a social media holiday calendar, for example. Analytics tools such as Highperformr can provide you with a list of top-engaged posts, most popular content formats, etc.
- Create valuable content: Creating valuable content should be your big focus. People need to see you have come back with some awesome content. That’s how you create a striking social media presence after a break.
3. Schedule Posts and Save Time
Scheduling posts is an effective plan to rebuild your social media profile to regain visibility. By gradually reintroducing your page and establishing a reliable posting schedule you become more memorable to your audience.
- Become consistent: Scheduling posts can help you regularly post on social media and maintain a consistent online presence.
- Save time: Instead of logging in and posting every day, you can dedicate specific time slots to plan and schedule posts for the upcoming weeks or months. This frees up time for other important tasks.
- Reach the right audience: Timing is crucial in social media. By scheduling posts, you can choose to publish posts when your audience is most active online.
- Increase engagement: Scheduling posts ensures that you keep up the pace of constant activity like regular posting, responding to comments, reposting and more.
- Optimize with data: Social media scheduling tools often come with analytics features that help you track the performance of your posts. With data, you can modify your content strategy for better results.
4. Bring Your Team Together
If you’re rebuilding your company page, it’s common to have multiple people working on a task. The benefits of collaborating as a team on a single platform are huge.
- Engage as a team: Add your team members under one dashboard and bring diverse perspectives and ideas together. Streamline editing, approval and publishing processes.
- 2X your reach: When employees share content across their individual networks, they amplify the brand's reach. This expands the audience reach and increases engagement with the brand's content.
- Humanize your brand: Employee advocacy brings authenticity and transparency. It humanizes the brand by putting a face and personality behind the company, which fosters stronger connections.
- Cost-effective marketing: Harnessing the power of employees' networks can generate organic traffic for your website without conducting paid campaigns.
5. Engage and Interact Meaningfully
Meaningful social relationships and loyal following are built with genuine interaction, listening to feedback and responding to your audience's needs. It involves:
- Responding to comments and messages: A prompt reply means you're attentive and value their input. It also encourages further discussion.
- Engaging in others' posts: Do you know commenting on LinkedIn is the best way to find new people to connect with? Engage with others before expecting it in return.
- Reposting their posts: Share the content created by your connection if it aligns with your audience. It shows appreciation and motivates others.
- Asking questions: If something intrigued you, ask more about it. Get a different perspective as often as possible.
6. Monitor and Measure Performance
Measuring your post insights is essential for understanding the right path while building a social media presence after a break. Here’s how to measure it right.
- Define your KPIs: Align your key performance indicators to your goal. Common KPIs include impressions, likes, comments, follower growth, referral traffic etc.
- Use analytics tools: Get all your analytics to a single dashboard with suggestions for improvements. See all features of social media analytics from Highperformr.
- Identify patterns: Over time these analytics reports will show you a pattern. Double down and optimize where there are growth opportunities.
- Benchmark against competitors: Compare your performance metrics with industry benchmarks or competitors' metrics to learn how you can improve.
To Wrap Up
A break from social media is common. With the right content strategy, proper scheduling and social media automation you can get back on track and get better at it. Highperformr is committed to elevating your social presence across multiple platforms with the power of AI.
TL;DR: Here’s a quick glance at the steps for how to build social media presence after a break.
- Audit Your Profile
- Create a Content Strategy
- Schedule Posts in Advance
- Bring Your Team Together
- Engage and Interact Meaningfully
- Monitor and Measure Performance
