Social media isn’t just ‘chatting’ with your friends, it is also a serious way to connect with your current, past, and future clients. You can make fun of people who Tweet but they are the ones getting your attention!
Could your business use more attention?
Many companies don’t use social media at all and some businesses that are using it, aren’t benefiting from its full potential. The power of social media can’t be dismissed. It truly is a great place to be found.
Social media is a powerful tool by which you can connect with people and market your business on a whole new level. It is a social arena where people can clearly see what you really do. It gives people a chance to take an interest in your business and the customers that you do serve through your business.
How to Get Your Business on Social Media
Getting started may take a little organising. Here are a few action steps you can take by answering these simple questions.
1. Do you know who your target market is?
One common mistake made by so many small business owners is not really knowing who they serve. If you open your virtual net to “everyone” this will have you putting out messages that will be of no interest to anyone.
Take some time to really look at the demographic of people you commonly serve, or want to serve. Next make a short list (up to 10) of your target market.
2. Do you know what you want to achieve?
Are you increasing your engagement with your community or do you need to mend some old wounds?
Are you looking for:
– more branding?
– more sales?
– increased awareness?
– bringing back old customers?
– developing new relationships?
3. Do you know what your message is?
When you are vying for attention, it’s a good idea to have an interesting and informative message.
Especially on social sites, it’s a good idea to be entertaining and vogue with educational information and useful material. Be your clients ally and help them out where you can. They will appreciate it.
For example, if you have an auto repair shop and someone tags you in a Tweet or Facebook post with a repair question, try and answer it. Be helpful. Maybe you can solve their issue without them having to come in and pay. They won’t be the only ones that will appreciate your good advice.
4. Do you know what your competitor is doing?
Whether you are building a business website or setting up your social media strategies, it is absolutely necessary to know what your competitor is doing.
Find out what your competitors are doing, then do more, and do it better.
5. Do you know who will be managing your social network?
Consistency is key. Engaging and interacting with your ‘followers’ is very important. There are certain times of the day that can be more effective for different offers or topics. You will need to test this.
Social media management can take more time than you might think. Hire or appoint someone to be in charge of this.
6. Do you know where your audience is during certain times?
Whoever you choose to manage your social networking opportunities make certain they ‘speak well’ for your company and they consistently put out useful information.
Don’t try to sell something all the time – that’s a good way to lose “friends”.
7. Do you know the rules on the social site?
Every social media site has its own set of rules. It is necessary to know and follow the terms of service specific to each site.
The rules are for everyone. You may see a competitor doing something against the rules like having an illegal contest. This doesn’t mean the site policy has changed, it just means they haven’t been caught yet. Violating site policies can have you barred.
Even though social networking sites are free, losing an account after building a relationship with 1000’s of followers will hurt. A FREE site suddenly gets expensive in terms of loss.
8. Do you know what social sites you want to start with?
It’s probably a good idea to start with one and get a good momentum going before concentrating on another. Once you have a good rapport with your clients on one social networking site, you can invite them to join you at your other sites too.
The top social media sites for business are Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube. There are others to consider for diversification but try to focus on the top performers.
You can cut down post times by tying in your social media to post automatically. There are several good tools that will tie in your website, social media, and networking efforts.
One hint though – even though you are concentrating on one social platform at a time, it’s a good idea to make your claim on all of them at once so you have consistency in your Branding.
9. Do you know what is considered a successful campaign?
Setting up a tracking sheet to measure different actions will help you to decide on the successes of various campaigns.
For example:
- – if your focus of a campaign was to gather more followers and likes, then you measure how many likes and followers you get.
– Or, perhaps you wanted to send people to a particular sales page on your website, those clicks and visits also need to be tracked.
Tracking your website traffic is one method used to can decide on the success or failure of a campaign. In this respect, no campaigns are failures as they all have valuable information; provided the correct methods of statistical analytics are taken.
