Having a social media presence is essential in today’s online marketing environment. You’ll attract new customers, evolve with the market and stay in touch with your existing customers.
Social media usage has grown to a huge proportion of the world – with over 2.5bil users. Spending at least some of your marketing time improving your social media channels is a smart investment.
Build Trust
Why should a customer do business with your brand over all the other brands out there? The person landing on your business page on social media likely doesn’t know much about your company. You have to educate them about your brand and build a connection with them. One way to do this is by building a significant consistent amount of reviews on your social media pages, so users can see what others think of your brand.
Also, don’t just hide behind your brand and logo – show the people behind it. By giving a personalised presence, it helps customers to engage and trust as opposed to a faceless organisation.
Integrate with Your Website
Connecting your website with your social media and vice versa is a potent way of increasing customer engagement and directing people from social media to your website, and from your website to your social profiles. With the increasing speed of transactions in today’s environment, having a social media source which people can interact with quickly allows you to provide an option for your customer base to quickly ask questions and receive responses.
Corey Batt note’s that they integrate social profiles for all of their clients because of this exact reason – with many of their customers finding a strong increase in customer interactions after running active social media profiles for their business.
Consider different social media channels
Most businesses use social media – and sometimes it can feel like your particular industry is flooding the social media channels that you use. Something to consider is whether they may be an alternative avenue to instead target. Sometimes thinking laterally can allow you to target your desired audience and get in front of more faces. As an example, if you’re an electrician who specialises in hospitality fitouts – Instagram might be for you. Most electricians won’t consider Instagram – but where are most restaurants and cafes? Gain a larger audience with less competition by spending time on platforms that your desired audience use, not where most of your competitors are.
Stay Active
It’s not hard to get distracted and fall back on consistently posting on your social media channels for a while, but in the current environment, large breaks in posting can make your business appear less desirable than your competitors. Whilst being active is essential – being consistent is the most important. Can’t post every day? Consistently post once a week instead. It’s better to space your posting out evenly like this, than post 10 times in two days and nothing for three weeks after.
Stop selling
Social media isn’t a one-way interaction – it’s about communication, engagement and community building. By pushing your sales message too hard, you can limit the interactions with your brand which in the long term can affect your bottom line. It’s still OK to talk about your sales and products – but do this tactically in between your other content. Post photos, news related to your brand, mention employees or even your favourite customer experience. Tell your viewers a story about your brand – so that when you have a sales message they’re already invested in becoming a customer.
