People who are getting started or who have been on hiatus from social media might need a few tips on how to get started. Watch the video and read below for more details!
Get in the Game!
Social media for a business isn’t anywhere near the same thing as for your personal use. The first thing you need to do, you’ve probably already done. Setup a business page on Facebook, create a twitter account for the business and possibly a Google+ account as well. If you don’t have a personal LinkedIn account you should have one, but a business page isn’t necessary. LinkedIn is mostly useful for professional networking, and not so much for customer acquisition, though it certainly can be done.
You may also want to take the time to build profiles on things like instagram or Pinterest, but this is more for product marketing or a service in which one visual image can impress your target demographic and increase their chance of purchasing services from you. There’s a lot of market specific info out there you can find to help you outside of the major 4 social media platforms.
When creating your pages make sure to put in as much information as possible, but where you must be short be concise too make sure you are marketing the most profitable services first, and try to be as informative as possible. If you have products, add them, make sure you use any and call to action buttons to your advantage, contact us, buy or shop now, and more.
Multi Channel Marketing and the Path of Content Creation
Now the real trick on social media is to realize that it’s a channel for marketing. The goal is to increase your marketing reach and therefore increase your customer base for the end game of making money and being successful in your business. So there are several things we need to keep in mind, the first is content.
What are you sharing on these platforms? Is it relevant to your business? It should be. Does it highlight an aspect of one of your products or services? Does it help you sell said products and services? Is it original? If not, you probably shouldn’t post it. UNLESS you think your audience will appreciate it.
Power of the People
Your audience is your second consideration, think about who makes up your target demographic, and the best way to get a message through to them via your marketing channel. This includes running promotions and paying for post boosts with targeting so the people see the posts you intend.
Facebook is an openly traded IPO and thus they must make money for their investors, gone are the days of reasonable free marketing on social media. But spend your money wisely! Don’t get suckered in by shysters who promise to get you a huge amount of likes quickly. Those likes are as hollow as the souls of the people who sell them, and it won’t help you increase your revenue.
Possibly the most important consideration is where you lead your audience. If your post is more of an ad, wouldn’t you want the viewer to end up in a place where they can buy your product/service? Make sure a link to the appropriate website is in the post. Don’t get a potential customers attention just to let them slide by your post, make it easy for them to find their way to you.
Hashtags are also important. Try to include a few to several, but not more than 5 or 6. All of them should be relevant to either the post or your business. Search topics and keywords are best for hashtags; also look up trending hashtags to get an instant boost in reach, as others looking for that hashtag will find your post.
Different Platform, Different Dance
Twitter has a very different strategy than Facebook if you are looking to be active on it. On twitter you want to be part of conversations relevant to your business. It might behoove you to seek popular people who affiliate themselves with your market and tag them in your posts and even directly address them, this will help you be seen by those who follow this individual, if you can maneuver the conversation to your benefit as well and even reference your products or services, all the better! The biggest issue with this is the time consumption just to find good targets for these conversations, then getting them to engage with you is it’s own obstacle. So get to thinking! And be creative!
Essentially Google+ is great for groups. If you can find a group to join and smoothly solicit yourself and your business, then get too it! It doesn’t hurt to post the same things on here as Facebook or twitter posts, as honestly few people are going to see it on Google+, this obviously differs by industry, but even just for the SEO value google+ posts are worthwhile.
And finally LinkedIn as mentioned before is great when you are looking for professionals, also now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn expect changes to roll out over time which might make it even more useful.
So there is your crash course on social media for small businesses, expect more tips soon!!