Using Social media to grow your business.
Using social media increases your online brand visibility. Better still by developing the right social media activities, it can also be your opportunity to connect and engage with your target audience.
And that means it can become an effective marketing strategy for generating business leads and sales for you.
There are a few things that you can do with your Social Media strategy:
1) Make it relevant. Getting seen by your audience is controlled by how the social media channels run their businesses. Similar to search engines, Social Media companies use “algorithms” that contain customer data such as interests, purchases, behaviour such as the topics they follow and serve content people see as relevant and personalised.
Think about what your audience is interested in and how you can relate your product or service in a relevant way to their interests.
2) Search results. Although there is no direct correlation with how a website will rank in search listings, social media account profiles get displayed in the context of search results. In many cases, the social media profile is among the top search listing for a business.
Consider how you can create a consistent brand identity and tone of voice to strengthen your online branding.
3) Social channels have search engines too. People can discover company content when using search within their preferred social media account. Make sure you optimise search for your social content.
4) Customer feedback. Once you open yourself up to social media, you will need to manage the customer comments on your social channels. Good or bad, they will reflect your brand’s reputation. Consider how you will handle negative and positive feedback.
Getting started in Social
If your business is just getting started, you may have limited resources; it’s better then to concentrate your efforts on the social media channels that will achieve the right results for your business.
Instead of creating a social media account across every channel, consider which ones and why.
Here’s an overview of the top three social media channels and how they can be used to promote your business.
Facebook. Nurtures conversations with your target audience.
With 67% of the UK population using Facebook, it’s an obvious one to consider.
Start by creating a Facebook page, with a profile photo and cover image; these should represent how you want your business to be seen. Include links to your website and contact information.
Make sure the “About” section is competed. It tells people what your business does and why you are different. This is your opportunity to make your brand stand out to your target audience.
You can use it to nurture existing customers. Responding to any customer comments or queries promptly demonstrates you care about your customers.
Encourage your audience to participate and engage with your brand.
Twitter fosters discovery, consider it as a way to discover more about your audience.
Twitter has a powerful search tool that enables you to search for topic keywords, hashtags or follow ongoing conversations about news or interests that are relevant to your business. By doing using the search feature, you’ll get a good idea of the type of content engages your target audience; you can then use this information to plan your Twitter content.
Instagram is a channel that gives you the equivalent of your shop window.
Think about creating a regular series of different types of content (Pillars) which allow your audience to get to know and expect your content on a regular basis, such as behind the scenes.
People love to connect with brands that are authentic and show them how they create their products.
Ask your customers to send in images featuring your product and showcase them on your channel.
Showcase product demos, educate them on why your product serves a purpose.
Provide some human stories from your staff or share stories that your customers are willing to share.
Creating a Social media framework
Once you’ve identified the channels you want to set-up, consider creating a Social media framework so that you have a template for creating content.
We create a framework for social media for the following reasons:
- Identifies your target audience’s online social media behaviour and the type of content that is most interesting to your target audience.
- Defines the type of content you create that will be relevant to your audiences. It helps to identify the content pillars for your brand.
- Takes into account the reasons and ways people interact with social media: For discovery, entertainment/engagement and participation.
When you have created your social media framework, this will help you define the frequency of the content by type. By doing this, you will be creating a content calendar, and this is useful to ensure you post content on a regular basis.