If you have a small or medium sized business, but you’re not on social media, there are huge sales opportunities you’re missing out on. Maybe you chose not to do any social marketing on purpose. Maybe you thought it was too time consuming, or that your business wasn’t right for social media. It might be that you thought you had nothing meaningful to share. At one time or another those might have been reasonable objections, but now they just don’t apply. If you choose the right platforms, and think carefully about your strategy, social marketing doesn’t have to be time consuming. It’s also a really effective (and free) way to generate new leads, build awareness, and spread your message. Getting started is easy.
Take a good look at your existing (or non-existent) social presence. Now look at a big brand’s presence, or maybe your biggest competitor. It’s more than likely that they’re sharing often and sharing well, and have a decent sized group of followers. You’ve got some catching up to do, and you might not ever get to their level, but you can certainly win some hearts and wallets on the way.
Despite what other people might say, you don’t have to be on all the social platforms. There are a great many to choose from, and they all have very different interaction models. Whilst some encourage longer posts and more gradual interaction, some are all about the right here and right now. Think carefully about which platforms suit your business best, and start with just a couple of them.
Of all the networks to be on, this is it. If you only choose one platform, choose Facebook. You should absolutely choose the platform where your audience is, but the chances are they’re all on Facebook anyway. With an average of 968 million daily active users, the odds are in your favour.
Facebook suits all kind of industries and businesses, precisely because it has such a broad range of people as active users. If you run a tool hire warehouse, for instance, you’ll be able to reach potentially thousands of tradesmen and DIY enthusiasts. If you run a small bakery, then you can reach a huge chunk of the people in your area and entice them with cake.
For small businesses, opening hours, maps, and offers mean more customers and more traffic. Alongside all the information about your business, you can inject a bit of its personality into proceedings, too, which is something you could never do in the Yellow Pages. Make sure that you accompany all of your content with links to relevant parts of your website, and you should see a noticeable uptake in the number of people visiting your site. More visitors means more sales.
There are so many options for content sharing on Facebook that your strategy can be immensely nuanced and varied. If you want to post a video guide to your store or product, accompanied with product images and blog-length entries about the goings-on at your business, feel free to do all three. You can provoke discussion through questions or polls, and get really valuable insights into what your customers want. Imagine being able to install a microphone on a billboard and record people’s conversations about it. That’s the power of Facebook, and social media marketing in general.
Over time, you can build up a sizeable band of likers. Out of those people, you turn some into absolute brand evangelists, who are likely to share your content and talk to their friends about it. We’ll say it again, if you only choose one platform, choose Facebook.
If you’re looking for more immediacy, then consider Twitter. Twitter’s user base is younger, more trend aware, and they’re mostly on mobile. So much of its traffic is mobile that you’ll want to tailor your strategy to it. Think brief, shareable insights into your brand and its offerings. You can share photos, but it’s best to fire off single images that you’ve selected carefully.
Users will be searching for specific hashtags and topics, so make sure that you’re onboard with the relevant ones. Everything you tweet has to offer some kind of value to a user, whether that’s an offer, information, or entertainment. You absolutely cannot just tweet product photos and prices. In the long term, this is likely to irritate your followers. Tweet well, and you can recruit some well-earned brand evangelists.
Twitter is a fantastic place to show off your brand’s personality. If a user mentions you, reply. They’ll feel a connection to your brand, even if they’ve complained and you’ve answered. Actively look for mentions of your brand, not just @ replies or hashtags, and start a conversation. The more you’re seen to engage with your audience, the more willing people will be to tweet about your business.
Not all social media is about entertainment and trends. LinkedIn is arguably the world’s most powerful business networking tool, but you can use it to promote your brand in much the same way as other networks. Start a page for your business, figure out what you can offer other business-types, and give it to them. A word of caution: your cupcake business doesn’t have much to offer. On LinkedIn, what works is thought-leadership and advice for particular kinds of industries. If you offer a service that benefits businesses particularly, then you’re in the right place. Offer a guide, a whitepaper or a research report, and you’ll soon gain traction as a valuable source of information. From there, you can start to attract new leads and build relationships.
Google+
People often neglect Google’s offering because they haven’t used it, and they haven’t seen people they know use it. Nevertheless, your presence on Google+ is worth revisiting. First and foremost, people searching for small businesses in a given area might be offered results on a map, with locations and opening times. You should make sure that all your business information on Google+ is up-to-date, so that these people know where you are, what you do, when you’re open, and why they should use you instead of a competitor. Google+ doesn’t have the same kind of user base as Facebook and Twitter, with people actively sharing content and posting regularly, and it probably won’t for a long time to come. Even so, it’s worth making sure that you’ve got your presence in order.
Tumblr
It’s a popular misconception that Tumblr is full of angsty teenagers and really weird blogs. It has those things in spades, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Tumblr is a diverse and vocal community of bloggers, and there are sections of that community who have very specific interests. If you have a particularly visual offering, for instance a catering business, floristry or events company, then Tumblr is perfect. By curating images and thoughts from Tumblr and around the web, you’ll be doing two things at once. Firstly, you’ll be providing interested Tumblr users with a wealth of content, all curated by you, the expert. Secondly, you’ll be building up a picture of your industry, its customers, its successes and its challenges — very useful stuff.
Your Tumblr might not get huge volumes of traffic if it’s particularly niche, but if you can capture those more vociferous bloggers in that niche and get them to share your content, you can extend beyond your niche and reach new, dedicated consumers.
YouTube
Copy is a good way to win over customers. Add images, and you’ll do even better. To really, powerfully engage an audience, you should use video. Trades and specialists can do particularly well by producing videos. If somebody needs to know how to fix something, and your brand has been the one to show them (and shown them they need professional help), then they’re likely to associate you with the problem. That’s a good thing. In essence, YouTube allows your brand to speak directly to its audience, with authority and meaning. It’s one of the most immediate ways to connect to an audience, and video is extremely shareable. Making a quality video is difficult, however, and may involve some costly initial outlay. Video that is lacking in sheen or executed poorly will reflect as such on your company. Consider investing in one or two professional videos. For shorter clips, consider the video functionality of other sites like Vine or Instagram, which brings us neatly to our next platform…
After Facebook and Twitter, Instagram is a strong contender for the next huge social media phenomenon. It’s already a very popular service, but it might just explode into the mainstream any day now. Part of its appeal is that it only does one thing, but it does that thing extremely well: sharing photos. For brands, this is absolutely invaluable. People log on expecting attractive and interesting imagery, and will reward you handsomely when given it.
If you have a variety of products, pick one each day to showcase to your audience. This works especially well if you have unusual gifts to offer.
Expect lots of interaction and likes when you post well, and more than a few new followers. Instagram is great for all kinds of businesses, provided you can give users attractive, original images on a fairly regular basis.
Now that you’ve got a grasp of how each platform might work for you, it’s time to start using them. Pick one or two to start with, and come up with a strategy for a month or two. You don’t need to devote much time to it, just enough to get it off the ground. Remember, too, that it’s all free marketing. Get social media right from the start, and you’ll have a much easier time growing as you devote more time to it.
Photo Credit: Jason Howle
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1hO8xCT via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1GQk2jM
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