Let’s imagine you’re starting a business from scratch and you want to find customers. You need to know where they go, what they talk about and who they talk to in order to promote your business.
One of the best places to start is social media. Why? Because your customers are already there. Now all you need to do is lead them from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn onto your website.
The benefits of using social media are:
Better brand awareness – Your following sharing your content is a great way to get your brands message out there
Higher website rank on search engines – Google takes performance on social media into account when calculating where to show users results
Improved customer service – Be more personal with your customers and speak to them directly
Cost-effectiveness – Social media is free if you post yourself, of course, it takes time, but that’s the balance you will need to make
Better customer insights – Social media has great analytics, use them to understand your customer
So, how do you go about using social media to promote your business? Use our step-by-step guide to guide you into promoting your business via social media.
Step 1
Choose the channel that fits your target market. It’s important to define your own target market and then choose the social media channel that makes sense for you.
Make sure you take into account the time you have, you can post on Facebook twice a week and still build a following but, if you post on Twitter at the same rate, you’ll never get there. Similarly, think about which channel fits in with your brand and the content you can provide. Are you likely to get loads of great photos? Look at Instagram or Pinterest or if you want to appear more corporate and appeal to a B2B audience, choose LinkedIn.
Step 2
Find your actual audience on social media. You can search for accounts that relate to your industry then follow those people or join the groups that relate to your audience.
Step 3
Post compelling content. It’s no good just having an account and posting some sales promotions plus the good old ‘visit our website’ tweet.
If you’re stuck on what your customers will relate to, think about who else your target audience follow and go and look at their pages and feeds. Look, not just at what their posting but what gets the most engagement. That means the shares, likes and retweets. I’ll give you a hint, it’s usually the non-sales related stuff unless it’s some very cool new technology or an exciting new product.
Step 4
Link back to your site. If you are looking for customers, the chance is that you can find them on at least one social media channel. Now, you just need to direct them to your website, this is done by simply adding a link to the compelling content you just created.