Small businesses everywhere have realized the value of marketing their company via social media platforms and maintaining a solid social media presence. Engaging with target audiences through social media allows brands to inject themselves and engage with existing and potential customers during passing moments through the day to educate and entertain them — which keeps businesses at the forefront of their minds. There are many different social media platforms, and it seems new ones crop up each day, so it may be tough to decide which channel to use to improve and maximize your social media presence.
Here are 5 Tips to Improving Your Social Media Presence
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Find the Social Network that Best Meets Your Business Needs
Now in 2020, Facebook has been focusing on adding more value to its Groups pages, Facebook Marketplace, and Facebook Stories. A business could set up a Groups page to share information about their business and tutorial videos and pictures and allow customers to interact with each other about how they benefit from your products, etc.; this is a free Facebook function and a great way to stay connected with your customers.
Facebook Marketplace is a peer-to-peer marketplace – similar to Craigslist – within the Facebook platform that allows people to send items such as clothes, furniture, electronics, and even find apartments for rent. If you own a business, you could add items for sale on Facebook Marketplace to drive business to your brick-and-mortar shop.
One of the newer functions that Facebook has recently added is Facebook Stories are a type of News Feed, but rather than written posts; it relies on short videos. You can edit the short videos with camera effects, and once posted, they are viewable for 24 hours, but after, they disappear. For a business, these short videos are perfect for flash sales or quick updates with new products or services, or to give fans a “sneak peek” behind the scenes of how you run your business.?
Finally, Facebook Shops offers full, e-commerce functionality so you can create a standalone store connected to your business’ Facebook page.
Facebook owns Instagram, so many ads and other features have a similar layout to Facebook. Some features that are unique to Instagram are the Story Ads, Shoppable posts, and IGTV. Story ads are where businesses can post small videos in the stories feed that users can swipe up to connect to a business’s website or product link; again, stories are only viewable for 24 hours. Shoppable posts are pictures that a company can post with a link to products and services.
IGTV is a feed of videos or short shows that you can post on your business account longer than a typical post or Story. Any IGTV video will save to your profile for future use or viewing. IGTV is perfect if you are posting a video on using a product or other videos that are more informative.
Both Facebook and Instagram offer “live” streams – where you can go live for customers to interact in real-time. Both Facebook and Instagram lives are useful to help fans get to know your brand – as an entrepreneur, you can setup Q&As so fans can get to know you better, or go live with someone in your industry for a fun chat.
You can build your company page on LinkedIn; once you have this built, add trending hashtags to make your page more searchable. You can encourage people to follow you on LinkedIn, where you can share your newsletters, website, and other social channels. LinkedIn is also an excellent tool for finding employees by allowing you to search for local resumes.
LinkedIn’s “expert” feature allows you to showcase your expertise – this is a great place for consultants and service providers to get in front of a B2B audience.?
Typically, when people think of Twitter, they think of following others to see what industry movers are saying. Lately, Twitter is starting to move towards video ads. With their new Lists feature, users can create lists to make a curated feed to keep informed about industry trends and community conversations.
- Snapchat
Snapchat has a reputation of being strictly for younger users; however, Snapchat works to provide content to all users. Recently they released their Augmented Reality (AR) function to develop a more interactive experience. Businesses can use Snapchat to highlight products with their object scanning and movement tracking with the AR experience.
Pinterest is mainly a vision-board tool for developing your dreams. However, recently Pinterest is moving towards a more marketing solution by its “Complete the Look” tool. The new tool allows the platform to recommend fashion and home d?cor products based on objects’ attributes within an image that the user’s searches or saves.
- TikTok
It seems like everyone is talking about TikTok more and more. TikTok is a short-form video app. Influencers on TikTok can add commerce URLs in posts for quick transitions to shops and advertisers, making TikTok more of an e-commerce platform. Businesses can create short videos with low-budget, high-value content and generate leads towards their products or services.
In order to be successful on TikTok, brands need to provide good information in short, engaging ways. On TikTok, copying others is acceptable! In fact, jumping on trends or challenges and making them unique to your brand will help you grow on TikTok.
2. Set Up a Marketing Plan
When you first venture into your business’s social media world, you need to establish a marketing plan. This way, you can have a consistent message as you move from platform to platform. Once you have the message (or in some cases, messages) you would like to deploy to your customers; you can develop content based on that message.?
3. Start Creating Content with Your Target Audience in Mind
You should have your target audience already defined as a first step in starting your business; if not, this is the perfect opportunity. You should know the age group, their background, and lifestyle, as well as their typical income level of your target audience. So, when you develop messages, you will tailor the message towards that target market.?
4. Use Tools to Schedule and Automate Posts
Staying active on your social media is the same as staying relevant in the market. If you build a profile but do not remain present on the platform, you could miss the opportunity of connecting with your customers. If you choose to use an automation tool such as BuzzSumo, MeetEdgar, Sprout Social, Buffer and others, you can schedule your posts in batches, and they will automatically publish, saving you time. However, the posts might be automated, but you still need to reply to responses or comments to keep a pulse check on your market.
5. Find Ways to Measure Your Progress
It is unnecessary to have a profile on each of the social media platforms, but you need to measure your success on the platforms you choose in order to look at data and improve social media presence. You could do this by seeing how responsive people are to your posts, such as the number of comments or views, or you could even give special coupons or discount code for those people who follow you. When you know where people respond to your posts, you can focus your time and effort more on those platforms.
