Social media has grown to be one of the most effective mediums for communication.
It’s about influence, news, referrals, market research, goodwill, promoting products and generating traffic, leads and revenue. It’s one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to build an online community you can engage with and who will talk about you and your business.
Here are some tips to make it work for you…
- Incorporate social media into your marketing plan
Think about how to make it work for you – come up with some ideas to engage with clients and potential clients, think about how you will attract fans and followers, set goals, invest time to build relationships, make it a priority and evaluate the impact and returns. - Be yourself, be authentic and be true to your brand
If you are a professional services company, be professional. If your business cares for people, children or animals, make sure your communication reflects a caring nature. Ensure that the personality of your business is reflected in your communication. Balance the fun, personable side of your company with the professionalism. Share company information, offer opinions on current events and industry news, highlight events you’re attending, show your personality. Be consistent! Use your logo and company colours. - Ask for recommendations
Having your staff interact with your Facebook and Instagram business pages is great. But it needs to be managed with guidelines put in place. Don’t allow your staff to use it as a discussion page about their social life, instead encourage your staff to build on the personality and nature of your business. - Use a variety of social media sites
Create a Facebook and Instagram page, add a blog to your website and link it to Facebook, link it all to Twitter, sign up to LinkedIn and join business groups, create a YouTube channel and embed video clips to your website, upload them directly to Facebook and Instagram. Snapchat is even becoming more mainstream. Find out what your target market is using and use it. Optimise content for keywords. It will all help your ranking with search engines! - Promote your social media presence
Link your accounts on your email signatures, websites, blogs and direct mail to promote social networks. - Know your followers
Are they customers, suppliers or prospective clients? Make sure you talk to each group rather than just focusing on one segment of followers. - Engage with your followers – don’t give them a hard sell
Instead, share info, talk about achievements, offer incentives and prizes, share a “sneak peek” of a new product – make followers feel valued. 80/20 rule – 80% engaging, 20% promoting. I did a course recently that suggested that you give away enough great content so that your followers are asking you what else they can buy because they already feel indebted to you for the value you’ve given them for free. How awesome would that be! - Update regularly
Update your social media regularly otherwise followers will lose interest. It doesn’t take long to write a post and we recommend that you write at least one blog or create one vlog per week (or one of each would be great!). - Share your knowledge
Share knowledge to become recognised as a thought leader which can lead to other opportunities such as publicity and speaking opportunities. Rather than promoting your company directly, create a vlog or write a blog or an e-book about the benefits of using your product/service and make it freely available. Promote vlog/blog via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Encourage followers to share content that they enjoy with their own networks. - Measure the effectiveness of social media
Measure and evaluate – monitor the traffic to your website, where it’s coming from, any change in search engine ranking, the number of followers, fans, contacts, the number of re-tweets, replies, posts, conversations and mentions your links generate, increase in sales/clients/customers who directly heard about you via social media. Tweet or post links to your website and measure how many hits they generate.
Whether you love social media or hate it, it’s here to stay – so find a way to use it and grow to love it!
If you need some help setting up or managing your social media activities, please give me a call or drop me a line.
0413 873 288
Email
Have fun!