Now grow your business through social media
Social media marketing is anything but fast and quick. There was a time where people considered social media as a passing fad. But now over 3 billion internet users and over 2 billion of them have active social media accounts. Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Snapchat are all the social media platforms where one can directly engage with their audiences.
But, how can social media benefit your business? If you’re wondering about this, we’ve outlined some important points for you to keep in mind.
1. Define your goals and your audience
It’s actually very vital to figure out your goals to have a solid understanding that whether or not your social media efforts have paid off. However in order to know your goals, it’s necessary to develop strategies to attain them. Also, social media is the best way to reach your target audience.
But how do you know who they are? When you identify your target audience it’s good that you consider factors such as age, location, income, career, education and interests. The more specific you be, it’ll enable you to create a strong social media strategy and you can reach your audience at the appropriate time.
2. Know your research
Now that you know your audience, you need to know which platforms they are actually on. There are varied active users on different platforms, so it’s not worth to invest on one social network if your audience is on some other platform. As a small business, your time and energy is most valuable.
3. Make a scrutiny on strengths and weaknesses
You need to go beyond just your research and understand the strengths and the weaknesses of each platform. Also how often you plan to publish your content should be considered as an essential point. For example, if you want your content to stay for a longer time, then Facebook is the right fit. But if you have to update multiple times a day then Twitter is the exact platform for posting multiple times.
4. Cater to your customers through social media
Thanks to social media, you don’t have to worry about relationship building with your customers. As a small business, being responsive and engaging has never been more critical. The best way to approach your customers is through Facebook and Twitter where they have private messaging capabilities. However, Instagram is great as a platform for engagement, it might not be the best to direct customers with questions about your product or service.
5. Develop user-generated content
Coming up with unique and quality content could be expensive. So user-generated content created by your customers can increase your social media presence and also helps you be active on social media all the time. However, you should ask yourself what type of UGC you could collect.
6. Know your numbers
If you want to know how close you are to achieving your goal, you should probably track your social media metrics. If you have a Facebook page, you need to measure the likes, post reach, impressions, unlikes and engagement. For Twitter, you have to concentrate on your retweets, impressions, @mentions, followers, and tweets linking to you. So monitor and analyse these numbers since they can ultimately decide whether you gain a customer or lose one.
Social media is evolving and new platforms and features are popping up. You need to evaluate and keep on experimenting until you get results that lead to your business success. As you grow, so will your business presence on these social media platforms.
Remember it’s the small changes that have a great impact on your business. You just need to put some extra efforts with the right data, strategy and tools. So when are you using these tips to market your small business?