Seven tips to getting started with Social Media in Sri Lanka

How to make the most out of Social Media for your brand? If this is a question on your mind, read on! Whether it’s yes or no, today we are going to take a deep dive into Social Media in Sri Lanka and discuss how to approach and optimize it to grab the attention of millions of your current and potential customers.

Why should your business use Social Media in Sri Lanka?

Without being available on social media, your business could miss out on customer feedback, new audiences, marketing insights, business opportunities and social media engagement that could immensely help your company. Additionally, not having a social media presence can render your business invisible and let’s be honest, we don’t want our brand to be a wallflower in the industry.

So like it or not, you need social media in Sri Lanka to promote your products/services, protect your company reputation and measure your business outreach against your competitors. It requires a lot of experience, effort, and expertise to succeed, but you can achieve it independently. 

Grab your favourite beverage, and let’s break down how to get started on social media in Sri Lanka. With these seven tips, your business is going to thrive and efficiently reach your organizational goals. And the best part, you can do it on your own.

1) Define your objective and goals

The first step to success in anything needs a definite objective and plan that leads to your goals. And this includes social media. 

Here are ten social media goals to give you an idea.

  1. Build brand awareness
  2. Increase social following and reach
  3. Strengthen brand loyalty
  4. Drive traffic to your website 
  5. Increase lead conversion and new business
  6. Grow revenue or increase sales
  7. Boost brand engagement
  8. Build a social community for your business
  9. Increase customer satisfaction by answering inquiries
  10. Stay in touch with social mentions and conversations.


First, define what you expect from your social media presence and create a framework that keeps you on track to achieve it. Do you want to generate and increase sales through social media in Sri Lanka? Or do you want your social media presence to manage your relationship with your customers and boost brand loyalty? What are you trying to get out of it? Your direct answer to these questions can help you establish your purpose on social media.

Don’t worry if you already have a presence on social media in Sri Lanka that doesn’t align with your objectives. You can turn things around and change your social media presence easily.

2) Do your research and plan with the available resources.

It’s hard to keep track or prepare for anything without knowing how to reach your goals and what you possess to help you reach your goal. So let’s get started by doing your research to achieve your expected objective. 

Here are some of our favourite online platforms to help you out.

Facebook Ads Library: Look into the ads your competitors are currently running and plan your social media content accordingly.

Google Trends: Discover what people are searching for and create content that people are interested in. 

AnswerThePublic: Plan your content by knowing the exact kind of queries your audience is looking for.

Take the insights you gain to build a strong plan.

3) Understanding your audience or social media users

Understanding your target audience thoroughly is the key to a successful social media presence. The newest social media platform Tiktok reached 1 billion active monthly users around the globe, faster than any other social media platform. This record is a significant achievement compared to how the platform was almost banned in the USA while being already banned in India, two of the world’s biggest markets. But, this huge audience response tells us that social media users consume more video-based content than other types of content. 

While mobile-friendly, verticle videos dominate social media content consumption, it is essential to understand your particular target audience, social media platform wise. As a brand, you need to analyze what you know about your customers and create a content approach that could appeal to your audience. To make sure you produce meaningful content for them, create a persona of your ideal customer and draw out a customer journey map. Be mindful of each step of the marketing funnel and produce content that provides value and promotes your business accordingly. 

Understanding social media users in Sri Lanka

Global social media users aren’t the same as our local social media users. There is a massive difference in audience data and trends across social media platforms, audience demographics, geographical locations, interests, or language usage. Staying updated about local statistics and trends is crucial to understanding how to effectively use social media in Sri Lanka for your business. We recommend you to follow Arona Digital social media pages to stay on top of the trends and never stay in the dark. 

DataReportal Digital Report 2021

 7.90 million users of social media in Sri Lanka

the most popular social media platform is Facebook, with 7 million users and 

over 60% of it being the male audience.

Twitter is the least popular social media platform with less than 200,000 local users in total. 

But has a dedicated base.

4) Create your social media brand personality

A brand personality is the way a brand represents and expresses itself. It is the driving force behind your potential customer’s decision to follow, interact and approach your business on social media. Figuring out your social media brand personality takes a deep understanding of everything mentioned above. 

For example, take Nike’s brand personality and how they integrate it into their social media communication. Nike’s personality is empowerment, courage, and resilience. Inspired by their slogan “Just do it”, their social media communication creates more meaningful connections than just the products they sell by inspiring and encouraging their consumers.

Link: https://www.facebook.com/nike/photos/a.440612488444/10155790686743445/

Link: https://twitter.com/Nike/status/1033211014899060737

Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CVOTZ_8rpJu/

Other brands like Coca-Cola use lifestyle appeal while Apple uses innovation and futuristic designs to communicate with their consumers. 

Take your time to find your voice, language, and tone of your communication, including your communication methods’ do’s and don’ts. Find out who your brand is, what makes your brand interesting, and the target audience you are reaching out to. Moreover, this will help you understand the best way to appeal to your target audience, build meaningful connections with your customers, create content that will make them pause and find success in social media.

5) Create a social media marketing calendar (and the content)

It is pointless to talk about everything about social media without talking about the content you put out there. A social media calendar is the key to your entire social media presence. Break down everything from the topic, the post copy, content medium (static visuals, GIFs or videos), the exact time/date, the social media platform/s, hashtags, links, tags and everything relevant to a particular post. 

Create a social media calendar to plan your content plan and the upcoming social media posts with the resources below. 

Canva: With ready-made templates, Canva allows you to create all kinds of social media content for any platform. Including video content.

Animoto: If you want to explore a platform dedicated to professional video editing, Animoto will help you create your own video easily with eye-catching templates.

Doodly: Create beautiful explainer videos with doodles for your social media.

Unsplash: Find free, high-quality stock images for your content visuals without a problem. Check out Pixlr or Pixabay too.

OpenPeeps: Find beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations for your content. You can easily customize them according to your needs. 

Coverr: Find free video stock footage for your video content. 

Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer: Check out how readable and clickable your ad copy is. 

PixelHunter: Crop and resize your images for any social media platform in seconds with this simple tool.

Grammarly: Make sure your social media copy and captions are proofread before you click post.

Later: Schedule and publish your content throughout social media platforms from this one platform. 

HashtagForLikes: Find trending hashtags to increase your reach on social media in Sri Lanka.

Prepare ahead of time with everything you need to post weekly, monthly, quarterly or bi-annually. 

6) Provide value and be responsive to your audience

Being on social media means providing value to make decisions and being responsive to the inquiries you get from your customers. We understand it is challenging to be online to reply to questions, sometimes the same question constantly. As the holiday shopping season approaches, being unresponsive to these questions will turn your customers towards another business that will respond to their inquiries. 

Prepare a list of FAQs and use chatbots to respond to these inquiries. Chatbots like ManyChar use artificial intelligence to answer questions and perform simple tasks in messaging apps like Facebook Messenger. ManyChat is a freemium chatbot tool that is integrated into Facebook Messenger. These bots will be beneficial with the increased inquiries during these times. Ensure the answers to these inquiries align with your general communication guideline and help your chatbot respond appropriately. 

In addition to that, your Facebook page will mention how responsive your brand is to any page visitors in the About Us section. Having the Very responsive to messages badge would mean there are consistent responses to inquiries quickly, which would prompt them to ask for more information.

7) Measure your progress and make better decisions

The final step of everything comes down to the results. Did you get the results you were expecting, or are you on the path to reaching your business objective? Different social media monitoring tools will help you listen, break down and understand your customer’s needs and responses to your products/services. 

One of the best free tools for Sri Lanka is MediaToolKit. You can use it to analyze your social media performance and understand what to do next with your social media account. These reports will also organize all the issues your organization needs to address and improve to provide better, more valuable service to your audience. Moreover, you can use these valuable insights to plan a long-term content marketing strategy and efficiently organize your production teams.

Conclusion:

Social Media in Sri Lanka is a great and cost-effective tool to grow your brand and expand your reach. Within a few years, it will be the primary marketing platform in Sri Lanka. Understanding different platforms, your audience, and the approach you need to build a solid social media presence is serious work. If you master it, you will make it work for your brand without any trouble. 

Working with a professional digital marketing agency can help you tailor your brand presence and create a solid social media and content strategy for your audience. Hiring Arona Digital ensures you have a well-planned strategy with consistent brand communication, highly creative content and increased customer engagement through multiple platforms. Our team will constantly explore different approaches and recommend new tactics that resonate with your target audience as your strategic partner. 

Your brand will get the most out of your social media budget with measurable results and a robust social presence with all the above working together.

Follow Arona Digital’s social media accounts to keep up with trends and find content inspiration or contact us for information.

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