With over one billion people using Facebook, the opportunity is ripe for small businesses to establish a social media presence.
Starting a social media account for your business is free and the benefits far outweigh the inconvenience of navigating the social media website signup process and learning all the bells and whistles related to social media analytics. A social media presence can also help you develop better-targeted ads for social media users to help grow your business and gain clientele and brand recognition.
Whether it’s through your hashtag strategy or omnichannel experience, social media is a powerful tool to combine with other marketing efforts. 42% of people say that they use social media to research new brands or products in order to make more informed purchases, with 25% of people following new brands from which they are thinking of buying products. Additionally, nearly half of social media users use the platforms to directly interact with brands.
Image Source: Valpak
While there are seemingly no downsides to building a social media site for your business, the truth is that without a strategy and goals, you may not be getting as much out of the social media landscape that you could be.
Thinking of setting up a social media presence for your company? First, identify your goals and desired outcome of your strategy. Do you want to tell more people about your company, gain more customers, and/or drive more purchases?
Look to others in your industry and check out their profiles to scope out the competition and see what works and what doesn’t work.
Setting social media goals requires thought and research, but is not difficult. Some common goals include increasing brand awareness, improve return on investment (easily achievable with free social media services), developing a loyal customer base, and improving in-person or online sales.
An important aspect of developing your social media strategy goals is to set S.M.A.R.T. goals. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Goals that are vague, difficult to measure, unrealistic, not directly relevant to the overall business strategy, or that have no timeline or an unclear timeline are less likely to get accomplished.
Once you have crafted your social media profile, think about the timing of your posts. Sites such as Twitter are checked frequently for up-to-date news and operate on a very fast timescale, while other sites such as Facebook have less dynamic content that functions more on a day-to-day scale. You can also use a tool like Rebrandly URL Shortener in order to track the links in your posts on social media. This way you will be able to receive analytics and click-stats to see which ones perform.
Think carefully about how you want to engage with your customers and the people interested in your business products or services. Customer engagement can help drive sales by helping customers learn more about your products, give them a chance to ask any questions, and represent the brand as one that is driven by the needs of its customers.
Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms offer a convenient messaging platform that enables one-to-one communication between your business and patrons or people interested in your company who have some questions about your products or services.
You can even use social media to schedule appointments or create events using the Facebook “Events” feature. Many companies offer software with integration with social media sites to enable online booking.
Social media influencers are people active on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, who have a large following and serve as a place where social media users can learn more about topics in which they are interested.
For example, the beauty industry has a number of influencers on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, who offer their honest opinions on products which they receive for free from companies. After you set up your social media presence, locate some influencers who have similar content or messaging. Then, reach out to them on the platform and try to develop a relationship with them, perhaps even sending them products in exchange for a review on their social media profile.
Once you published new articles on your blog, make sure that it is easy to share. You will, of course, share your own content on all the social media profiles you have, but others will only do so, if it is as easy as it gets. Nor your employees, neither your social media followers will spend minutes figuring out how to share a post from your website and will definitely not copy-paste a link, especially when on a mobile device. So make sharing so seamless, that there's no excuse for not doing so.
There are fantastic plugins out there for distributing content. For example, Better Click To Tweet is great for tweeting prewritten posts to Twitter. If you're looking for an all-in-one solution, however, Social Booster might be the perfect fit for you, as it automates social sharing to the most popular platforms, and even allows you to see how your content is being shared.
For a step-by-step guide to improve your small business’ social media presence, Valpak put together a helpful resource.