Social Media can create wonders for your business but you need to know the basics on how to do it well to get the most out of it. The internet is becoming bigger and better, but this means marketing your brand is becoming more difficult. Having a “niche” business is quite rare in today’s society, so making your business stand out is vital.
It is estimated that in 2020, 3.6 billion people were using social media and that 37% of these users find inspiration from these channels. This means when you do social media right, you can gain the trust of your consumer.
However, there are different routes you can go down when it comes to social media, with going either organic or paid promotions.
Keep on reading to find out the fundamentals of Social Media.
What is Social Media?
Maybe you have been living under a rock for your life or you have just never shown an interest in social media. Social Media platforms are a variety of sites where people can communicate and engage with other people through the web. It’s utilised by both consumers and businesses, with people creating careers through these platforms.
On social media, you share different media, such as photos, videos, blog posts and general messages. Which people can respond to by liking, sharing or commenting on your posts, these people can then follow you which helps generate a following for your profile.
Social media uses a special algorithm so the more engaged your followers are the higher your profile will be in regards to visibility and conversions. This is the part where most businesses will fall at the first hurdle.
What can Social Media do for my business?
There are many businesses who are thriving with success on social media, then there are some who struggle and can’t see the point in utilising it. Social media can take time to work up a following and convert followers into customers, but putting time and strategies into place can make you successful on social media.
Social media is not a fad, so taking the opportunity of progressing your business and opening new opportunities through social media is essential.
Did you know that a non-customer is x3 more likely to visit a retailer, just from seeing their social media profile or ad?
“But how can I use social media for my business?”
We recently wrote a blog post on Top 5 benefits of using Social Media to help your business, but we will lightly touch on this within this post.
A lot of business owners will have a traditional mindset for when it comes to marketing and the big question that any digital marketing agency will get is “will social media be right for my business?” The answer to that is yes, with the right strategies and utilising the features of all the platforms, you can be successful!
But like anything in life you need to work on your social media strategy to see a difference. This means getting it spot on with your target audience, understanding your customer persona and why they are coming to you.
We understand that to be successful on social media it takes time, and if you don’t have the funds to splash out to a Digital Marketing Agency then this can be difficult.
But social media has its chosen name for a reason. This network of platforms can entice new customers and create award-winning business for your company. Think of social media as if everyone is a potential customer, comment back and let them know that you are interested in what they have to say.
Utilise your Instagram and Facebook stories and engage with your audience; ask them questions; offer them polls and make them feel as if they are apart of a community
If you are struggling to gain comments then tell your followers what to comment, using captions such as “comment if you are loving our content.” In a world where people tend to overthink, telling them what to comment can ultimately improve your follower’s experience.
Here are other ways that social media can help you:
- Build relationships
- Getting feedback/praise
- Integrating other marketing strategies
- Get your brand awareness more known
- Increase conversions and customers
- Can be more cost-effective
- Create a higher brand loyalty rate
Let’s get into which platform may be suitable for your business.
Let’s be honest, Instagram is definitely the “it” platform at the moment. It’s a place where you can be visual and use your profile as if it were a shop window.
But Instagram doesn’t have to just be images. In fact, it’s highly recommended to utilise videos and include text onto images. Find ways that you can gain the interest of potential customers to your brand. Instagram is also home to stories which is an interesting concept if you want to engage with your users that little bit more. You can offer polls, ask questions and even just film yourself talking to your audience. People love when they can feel connected to a brand and stories are the perfect way to help.
Hashtags! You probably see lots of people using them and Instagram is the place where the more you use the better. Using websites such as ritetag can help you to determine what keywords will work for your industry.
You can utilise the ads feature on Instagram with being able to promote your posts, by selecting a target audience, deciding how long you want an ad to run for and adding a daily cost. This is a good option if you have tried to gain more organic customers and it just isn’t working.
Facebook also owns Instagram, so whatever you post to one platform you can get it to post to the other one at the same time.
With Facebook, it is very good for if you want to put out basic graphics, text, videos and even share links to external sites. Facebook also offers a marketplace where you can sell products if that is something your business would be interested in.
Another useful aspect of Facebook is the ability to join groups. This can be very useful if you want to discuss a topic with people who are in the same industry as you. You can also share job applications and even find potential customers.
Like Instagram, Facebook tends to be popular with visual posts and it’s slowly becoming more focused on video content, so learning some video skills can be vital. It’s also important as a business to complete your profile with adding business hours, contact details, address, adding what products/service you do, telling potential customers what you do and even linking to your website.
You can do the same as what Instagram does in regards to paid ads, which for the same reason is excellent for gaining more customers.
Linkedin is definitely the harder platform to gain a following on, as it tends to be mostly B2B business or people who are within the same industry on it.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t advertise your brand through it. If you are a B2B company then Linkedin is most definitely your top choice for selling your products/services, you can connect and network with potential customers through the messaging option.
Just like Instagram and Facebook, you can post all kinds of content like blog posts, graphics, images/videos and even just creating a text post. The main difference between Facebook and Linkedin is that through Linkedin you can make your job history more known, while also adding what school you went to and any skills/hobbies you have.
Your clients can leave reviews and endorse any skills that you have, which can help with either finding new jobs or clients. You can build a team of connections that help each other out with business and ideas, which acts as an online network.
But Linkedin isn’t just set for B2B, it’s open to B2C with businesses being able to recruit and influence the users that are putting Linkedin to use.
You can even promote your posts, but Linkedin tends to be more expensive than Facebook and Instagram.
Twitter is for those of you that want to get information out quickly without having to write masses of words. It is limited to a short character count of 280 characters, which was recently doubled from 140 characters.
To make Twitter useful to your business it’s worth utilising what is trending on that current day and aiming your posts towards those. Unlike Instagram the fewer hashtags you use on Twitter is better, else people will just find you spammy if you overuse them.
Twitter is excellent for starting conversations, for making company announcements more known and with keeping in touch with customers.
If you like to share other people’s content then you have the option to retweet onto your profile so more people can see that post. You can even add images/videos and include links to blog posts that you may have written. It’s important to know that Twitter is a very fast-paced platform, so tweeting a few times a day will help you to make sure the content you are putting out isn’t irrelevant.
Create a content calendar and strategy
As humans, our brains aren’t produced to be effective 24/7, so if you can organise your thoughts and ideas beforehand, coming up with ideas will feel like a piece of cake.
Social media marketing should follow closely to your company values and your customer persona. To make it more simple to get your content across to the correct people set up a carefully tailored content schedule. You can determine what time periods work best for you, maybe you prefer to organise it a week at a time or maybe you are extra organised and want to spend the time to produce a monthly schedule, it’s up to you what works best.
It can be difficult to come up with inviting content day after day, so preplanning will be your best friend when creating successful social media campaigns.
Most social media platforms will now offer a built-in content scheduler, which will save you from remembering to post each day you want to share content. Not only does this make you more efficient as a worker, but it will make sure that you have quality content going onto your social media accounts. You can also go down the paid route of using either Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your social media.
Make sure you have a strategy, research who your competitors are and what they are doing differently to you. Look into your ideal customer, what do they like, what careers do they have, do they have pets or have any hobbies?
It’s also important to choose one or two platforms that you are going to concentrate on, as trying to succeed on every platform is only going to become a chore for yourself.
If you found this blog post interesting oy maybe you would like more information then please get in touch, we would love to help.
Megan 🙂