We all know social media is an excellent tool for business, but some are unsure how to make the crossover from a personal account and communicating with friends and family, to using social media for business and influencing followers.
For a start, social media is one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. The biggest question is, which social media platform do you choose for business? And what are the best social media marketing tips?
The Top 10 Social Media Platforms for Business
Here is a list of the top 10 social media platforms for business you can use:
- Facebook – No surprise
- Facebook Messenger – Has a few additional features to Facebook
- Instagram – Owned by Facebook and uses the same advertising platform – also a cheaper alternative at the moment.
- Pinterest – Caters more to females, 81% in fact.
- Snapchat – Geared more to younger users.
- YouTube – Owned by Google and uses visual aspects for advertising (video)
- Twitter – Based on live (real-time) updates
- LinkedIn – Considered a social media platform for business
- Google Plus – Can help with Google rankings even if you don’t gain many sales from there.
- Yelp – This can play a crucial role in supporting your brand.
Why You Should Use Social Media
Marketing in traditional ways such as regular advertising and direct mail are becoming less effective.
Businesses are turning toward social media in business where they can connect in positive ways with consumers and the other people who can influence them.
One entrepreneur tip is to not become hung up on all the tools and the technology, instead focus on how you can use them, and the social media basics to effectively to achieve the following:
- Increasing personal brand visibility and that of your business
- Building and cultivating personal and professional networks
- Developing and growing relationships with your customers and their influencers
- Being able to engage in real-time two-way communication with people. This includes answering queries.
- Actively publish and distribute your original content which demonstrates your overall expertise
- Share all your curated links to relevant information. This will add value to your customers
- Being able to actively communicate with your followers and supporters
- Go on to build new leads, and boost overall sales of your business.
The Social Media Equation and Understanding It
Social media can be looked at in two parts:
Social Media Participation
This area is where you present your social media channels and providing value to the online community in the way of:
- Sharing each other’s content on FB or LinkedIn. Re-Tweeting on Twitter or reposting a gram on Instagram.
- Answering peoples questions if you can. These can be related to your business or not.
- Joining conversations of particular topics
- Leaving interesting comments on selected blogs
- Helping promote other users businesses
Creation and Distribution of Original Content
This should inform, empower and educate and entertain your followers. It should also help attract the right people to your brand and potential customers.
All content on social media needs to be created with the audience in mind.
Creating Content for Customers
Content must be useful and add value to followers lives. Once you have done this, and you see it is valuable information. You can directly post it on the platforms you have chosen. From here you can share links with your followers.
When you build a presence on social media, it is a great way to share content, and search engines use this content to determine the usefulness to your audience, and in turn, your Google rankings are affected.
Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts
If you use more than a couple of social media accounts, it can get confusing, and you spend all day flicking backward and forwards through them.
Here are 5 simple tips on how to manage social media accounts for your business when you have more than a couple.
Step 1: Document all your social media branding strategies so they can all fall in line and be similar.
Step 2: Use social media management software. This can help you post once, and everything is synced to all of your social media accounts. This helps with managing engagement and publishing in one package.
Step 3: Create an editorial calendar or to do list. This can highlight when you need to post next and keeps track of your marketing campaigns.
Step 4: Monitoring and Engaging. This is to help make sure you don’t post twice to user comments or posts.
Step 5: Analyse your strategy: You can see all of your accounts and how they are performing on an individual level. Until you check your analytics, you might not notice which social media platforms aren’t working for you.
To go through all the social media tips for business on every social media platform could fill reams.
But you can see here the basic principles of how you need to connect and engage your followers and customers more than anything.
Without engagement, your potential customers will somebody else’s customer.
Want more ways to promote your local business? Check out our local SEO guide.
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