Social Media and Social platforms, over the years, have become a significant part of our daily routine. Our Social media profiles allow us to express ourselves and share our lives with our family, friends, and by extension, the world.
For a while now, it has become increasingly obvious that social media is here to stay, and that it should be viewed as an important tool that can be utilized for different purposes. One such purpose can be growing your business.
Therefore, this article will help you learn how to utilize social media for your business, from choosing your preferred social media tactics to learning the ups and downs of influencer marketing.
Choosing the Right Platform
Social media is a vast entity, and different people use it for a vast number of different reasons. Thus, the first step in using social media to grow your business, is identifying and choosing which platform is right for your business. If you go about this crucial step in the wrong manner, you risk losing your target audience, and costing your business the needed marketing. Much like regular marketing, marketing on social media is all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. By understanding why people use certain social media platforms, it will make it easier for your brand to tailor its content accordingly and increase the odds of receiving engagement.
Here are some of the Social Media Platforms you may choose to market on:
Facebook is the most obvious choice with over 2.6 billion monthly active users. It is a good platform for more engagement based content, and is also compatible with video and photo content.
Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger is evidently an extension of Facebook. Its allure is in the fact that it allows the use of AI bots to answer customer questions without any actual human work force required.
Instagram is an image and video based networking site, and is an amazing place to grow your business, especially through brand engagement and awareness. You can also use features such as Instagram stories and lives, to fully utilize the platform. Interacting with other profiles also helps your engagement rise, as well as pushes your account to more accounts.
LinkedIn is the perfect place to advertise your business, especially when it comes to setting up webinars and putting out job offers. It allows you to sell your business to the world, while simultaneously providing high quality content.
Twitter
Twitter is a platform that relies on short form content. It can be used to live tweet events and bring attention to them, as well as to provide customer service.
YouTube
YouTube is not a platform used predominantly for marketing purposes and can be difficult to utilize as such. The best way to market your brand on YouTube is to work with influencers and sponsor their videos.
Ways to use Social Media For Business
1.Work with Influencers
Influencers are an important part of Social Media marketing, and exist within every industry. It is important to identify which influencers fit your brand and your specific area of business before reaching out to them. To establish a relationship with your chosen influencers, start by liking their posts and leaving comments on their profiles. With platforms like Twitter and Instagram, you can also direct message the influencer to extend a formal offer to work with them or offer a sponsorship.
Run Competitions
Competitions are a fun and assured way to garner some engagement and attention towards your social media account, although your brand needs to already be an established one for a successful competition to hold any value. This is because competitions require existing followers to get excited and spread the word about the competition, thus doing the marketing for you. Competitions may include giveaways or guessing games, with some form of prizes to attract followers. This increases the engagement on your account, thus increasing the reach of your brand. Make sure to use hashtags such as #competition to promote the competition.
3.Go Live
Most Social Media platforms provide you with the live feature, which allows you to stream yourself to your audience and interact with comments and customer queries in real time. It is important to first identify whether your audience is interacting with live content, and best utilize the feature in the way that it works for you.
The live feature can be used to host Q&A sessions, to host webinars, showcase live performances, or other virtual events. This form of content helps the audience feel included and increases the relatability of your brand. It is imperative that you experiment with different forms of content and approaches to figure out what works better for you and your target audience.
Use Stories
Stories are short form content that are extremely useful in the new age where people have increasingly low attention spans. People like using stories as it allows them to tap through content at a fast pace. Therefore, it is important for any business to utilize this tool to promote their business. However, just the right amount of stories can help boost your profile, while if you ‘spam’ the feature too much it might make your audience lose interest in your content. Stories are also a great medium for advertisements, and allow you to reach your audience at a more frequent pace without overwhelming them.
Use Advertisements
Social Networks allow you to run ads to a specific target audience that is specifically tailor based to your type of content. This is because most social media apps gather data on their audiences which can be utilized to market specific products to them. This feature obviously requires you to set aside some money from your budget, however it is worth it as it increases your reach and promotes your business to your target audience.
Analytics
If you have a business account on any Social Media platform, they will most likely provide you with analytical data that will help you learn more about your target audience and tailor your content accordingly. Platforms like Instagram even provide details on the gender, age, and location of the majority and minority of your audience. It is important for any business to make use of the data provided and fine tune your social media strategy; Do more of what gets your content more engagement, and less of what doesn’t. Also keep an eye on how your analytics change over time.
In general, it is important to make Social Media Marketing an essential part of your business and utilize its tools to market your business accordingly.