Social media can be a great way for businesses to connect with customers, and done right, it can really boost sales. Some start-ups have built an entire business through the use of social media management.
Here are our top 5 tips for making social media work for your business:
Understand your customer.
Understanding who your customer is, means you know which social platforms they are likely to be on. Are you a B2B Business? If so, the chances are LinkedIn is going to be the best social platform for you. Are you B2C selling beautiful products, then Instagram could be the platform that is right for you.
Many businesses create a profile across all social media platforms for fear of being left behind! But let’s face it, we don’t want to create more work for ourselves, so don’t waste your time creating a presence on a platform that your customers aren’t using.
According to a study by Sprout Social, the main age group for Facebook is 25-34 whereas LinkedIn is 46-55. Understand where your time is best spent on social according to your customer type. You can take a look at the full report here.
Define your goals
Your social media should be treated like any other element of marketing. Define your business goals and then take time to think how social media can help you achieve those goals. By doing this, you will be able to start monitoring your success by defining clear KPI’s right from the start. Ensure social media becomes part of your bigger strategy.
Some examples of business goals to be helped by social media are:
- Build the Brand – Social media can help build brand awareness and in turn this helps your business objective of building your brand
- Generate 10% more web traffic – Ensure clear calls to action to visit your website on social media posts and this will help your business objective of increasing website traffic
- Sell 20% more of a specific product – Product promotion through social media can be targeted and inexpensive, this in turn could help you reach this business goal
When setting your goals try and be specific so that it is easier to measure the success and don’t forget, social media is likely to be just a piece in the puzzle.
Start a conversation
Social media was created around the idea of virtual communication. By starting a conversation on social media, you are starting a conversation with your customers, or prospective customers, in real time. This is a great opportunity to answer questions, ask questions, run polls or get customer feedback, all of which help you to form a relationship with your followers.
Starting engagement can be simple, asking followers to comment with a question, or asking for feedback is a great start to opening the conversation. This can often lead to more authentic engagement, which also helps boost brand loyalty among prospective customers.
As well as starting conversations, it is also important for your organisation to join in the conversations happening online. Follow relevant hashtags for your business and join in the conversations using these hashtags, especially those that are trending.
Share unique content that is valuable to your customers
The key to good content is value. An organisation’s social media should always offer value to the end user’s feed. Value-added content can come in many forms, it can be entertainment through videos, information through infographics, top tips, or links to interesting and reliable content. Think outside the box on how you can offer value to your followers.
10 examples of value-added content:
- How-to Guides
- Infographics
- Workshops
- Newsletters
- Blogs
- E-books
- Case Studies
- Promotional Content
- Tutorials
- White Papers
Because this type of content provides actual value, it tends to be popular with readers and is rewarded by higher engagement levels. This will help organic follower growth.
Use analytics to monitor success.
By setting goals, you are setting a benchmark for success. All social media platforms offer fairly comprehensive insights, including number of clicks, profile visits, follows and engagement levels for posts. This will enable you to start to understand what type of content is generating the most engagement giving you an understanding of what types of content your followers want to see.
With any type of marketing, monitoring success is always a valuable exercise. If you do not already have it, setting up Google Analytics on your website is a useful thing to do because it enables you to be able to track the traffic that social sends to your website. This is especially important if one of your goals is to increase web traffic.
Summary:
It is true that almost every business should be on social media. What is not true, is that every business should be on all social media.
Understand your target market and which platforms they are likely to be on and define your business goals so you can understand how using social media can help you achieve these goals. Without goals, you cannot measure success!
Be a brand that is happy to start a conversation, this makes your brand feel more personable and will encourage more brand loyalty.
Be sure to reward the loyalty of your followers with value added content, this will generate more engagement and in term will aid with organic follower growth.
Don’t forget to measure your success! If you don’t measure success, you will not be able to see the value in social media. The most important thing of all, is to enjoy it, and be true to the voice of your brand. People only want authenticity in their feeds!
