Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog about building a social media community and it was shared a lot across multiple social media platforms which is great. Building your community online is extremely important, but so is building your presence. Without using these social networks, you won’t have a strong, loyal community.

Starting from scratch with social media is extremely daunting, especially if you are a start up business, and don’t have the money to spend on getting the help you feel you need. Here are my 7 powerful tips to building a social media presence.

1. Stay relevant, and up to date

When building your social media presence, you need to make sure that you are sharing information that is on trend with what is going on in your industry. Content is key, which I will talk about more in tip no.4.

2. Optimise your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is an extremely important social network, especially if you are the person in front of your business, and need to be seen as such. I have written some great articles about optimising your LinkedIn profile 100%. You can see them here.

3. Ask Questions

One of the best ways to build your social media presence is by asking questions. Simply reaching out to your audience and showing them that you care about what they have to say will go a long way and build trust.

4. Content is key

Sharing valuable, relevant content for your audience is a great way to build your social media presence from day one. If you are sharing information that your target market is interested in, two way conversations will flow naturally.

If you don’t know what content will work for your audience, ask them. Ask your community to fill out a quick, 60 second survey where they will receive something complimentary in return. This is something I have done, and has proved successful on many occasions.

5. Leverage Instagram

The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Share an image and you grab your audience’s attention 60,0000x faster. Tweets with images will receive 150% more retweets and 89% more favorites and because of this Instagram needs to be your new best friend.

With Instagram, you can use as many hashtags as you like as long as they are relevant to your post. Doing this allows you to build a targeted social media presence.

As I have already mentioned, images are extremely powerful on social media however, there is one thing that is more powerful and that is videos. Taking video clips of behind-the-scenes, latest products, customers enjoying your product and other industry related videos are a great way to reach out to your consumers when building your social media presence.

6. Have a Social Media plan

A huge part of having a successful social media presence, is planning all of your content and posting ahead of schedule. Save time (and ultimately money) by doing this, whilst making sure you are staying consistent with the messages you are posting online.

If you don’t have a social media plan template, I have one readily available to download here. I also ran a webinar just last week, where I share my tips and tricks to building a social media plan for success. You can watch a replay of this webinar here.

7. Monitor your reputation

This is extremely important. When it comes to your reputation online, you need to be aware of anything negative, so that you can face it head on and deal with it straight away. A tool which you can use to do this is called Social Mention.

I hope these 7 tips will help you build your social media presence!