October 13th, 2016
Are you or a business you're working with just getting started with leveraging the power of social media? If you're trying to figure out the best course of action for an effective launch and sustained success, read on for five tips to get your social presence up and running:
1) Identify Your Goals, Voice, and Audience
Your social media strategy should be an extension of the brand that you've already built for your business. Do you dress casually or formally when you go to work? What kind of customers tend to gravitate most to your business? A well planned social media approach that reflect your brand, personality, and customer base will always work better than a random social media strategy.
Make your Social Presence Reflective of Your Business Goals
Every business should have a set of goals that they wish to achive. Make sure your social media plan speaks to those goals directly. For phyisical locations reliant on foot traffic, your social media goals should be to create awareness and drive more traffic. For businesses selling products online, your social media strategy should be driving traffic to your website and informing potential customers about what your products are. A healthy mix of posts that speak to your goals and helpful related content will ensure that your businesses goals are met.
Create a Voice for Your Business
In other words, how do you want leads, prospects, and customers to think of your business. Your digital voice should be an extension of your brand. Identify the tone you want your business to have and execute on social channels. Everything from the words to the images, and the content you share on your social networks should come together to weave the story you wish to tell about your business.
Start by defining how you want to be perceived and jotting down some words that you would want people to use when describing your business.
Identify Your Audience
Make a list of who you believe your typical demographic segments are. Everything from an age range to occupations, to interests and geographical areas will help you to understand who you are trying to speak to. Understanding these segments will only help you to craft content that is meaningful to the people that you want to reach.
2) Fill Out Your Profiles To Completion
Completing your social profiles is an important step in having a sound social strategy. A completed profile will help legitimize your social media efforts. Likewise, an incomplete social profile will give visitors to your profiles little reason to follow or engage with you online. A lack of posting or activity will yield the same results.
Some things to keep in mind when signing up for and filling out your social accounts include:
- Give users reasons to follow you in your description/bio sections, or even in your images
- Make your contact information clearly visible
- Include the who, what, where, and why's of your business in your social profiles/descriptions
- Upload relevant images wherever prompted - cover or banner images, profile or logo images, etc
3) Connect & Engage with Prospects and Industry Leaders
Connect with Prospects
Do you know who you'd like to do business with? Show them that you care about what they have to say by connecting with them from your social profiles. 'Like' their pages on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. This will show that you're proactive and open for business. and will generate the positive feeling of having a new connection. Take it a step further by taking a small amount of time to engage with their comment. A simple 'like', comment, or share goes a long way in terms of solidifying a sense of good will.
Connect with Industry Leaders
Connecting and engaging with industry leaders similar to the methods outlined above can benefit your business in two significant ways:
- It shows that you take your industry seriously
- You'll be found and engaged with more often as your business appears in front of other users who engage with the same industry leaders
Don't forget that social media is supposed to be social - connect and engage with prospects and industry leaders.
4) Respond to Questions, Comments, and Criticisms
As you build your profiles and begin to follow and interact with others on social media, you'll begin to receive questions and comments to your accounts and your posts. In part two of "social media is supposed to be social", don't ignore these correspondences, respond! If someone leaves you a compliment, a simple "thank you" goes a long way. If someone asks a question, do your best to answer it with a positive spin whenever possible. If given a negative review or criticism, follow these steps (and read our blog post How To Respond To Negative Yelp Reviews):
- Apologize
- Explain the issue and your solution
- Invite the customer to give you another chance with an attractive offer
Regardless of whether questions or comments to your social media accounts are positive or negative, it's important to respond to them. Responding to these questions and comments will serve to humanize your brand - a key component of building meaningful relationships with prospects and customers.
5) Track and Leverage Industry & Social Media Trends
SocialOwl makes it easy to monitor and post industry-related articles through our content feed utility. Using this tool, you can pull in RSS feeds relevant to your industry to view and post articles that your readers want to see. Furthermore, you can attach banner ads, email sign-up forms and more for your business to the bottom of these articles using SocialOwl's content banner tool. Posting and highlighting relevant trends in your particular industry will validate your knowledge surrounding your business/industry.
Likewise, since your on social media, use built-in tools of the trade like hashtags. Hashtags allow you to join conversations on trending topics, gets you found in searches, and can add further context to your posts.
In addition, use tools that let you research popular hashtags and discover trends and sentiment about any topic. This can be pretty handy when you want to create content around a specific theme.
Conclusion:
While social media is a free medium to promote your business, it does require some time to set-up for effective use. The good news is that once set-up, feedback will begin rolling in in real time, so make sure to take the time to get your profiles set-up for success.