Despite the negative attention given lately to Facebook, Twitter and the like, social media marketing still provides small business owners with a great opportunity to connect with customers and prospects in a personal way while
standing out versus the competition.
What’s more, social media networks are powerful yet efficient communication channels where you can impact customer awareness and perception with relatively low out-of-pocket financial investment. With that in mind, here are some tips for Social Media Marketing Success, updated for 2019.
Start with some Homework
As one ourselves, we recognize that time is a precious commodity for small business owners and employees. To maximize return on time invested in this arena, spend your initial effort researching and finding out which social media platforms your customers and prospects are using and, equally important, when they are using them.
There is a trove of information available on the internet about this. Pew Research, for example, has a great article about Facebook and how it compares to other networks. Social Media experts Blue Corona published user profiles for the top six Social Media networks last year. And trade organizations hire experts to report on the best use of social media for specific industries like restaurants, construction and the marine trade.
This is a start – there is plenty of information on the internet about various sites and why they might be right for your unique situation. We here at Voncor can also help.
Don’t “Follow People” Just for Follows
When you launch a Facebook profile page, you have an option to invite friends, colleagues and customers to “Like it” so it’s easy to get started. This is not the case with Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. What many businesses do instead is “follow” people to begin a relationship and, once these people follow them back, mute their feeds or unfollow them a short while afterwards.
While this might seem a smart way to connect people to your profile and expose them to your posts, companies using this practice can seem disingenuous and potentially sour people on their business. Why? They bet their new followers won’t realize they’ve unfollowed them. When discovered, followers may feel slighted.
An alternate approach to build a following is to add industry relevant hashtags to your profile and to get a few posts up right away with content about your business, services and relevant topics. This way, people who are looking for information about your field will easily find your posts. When you post great content consistently, they will like your page even without an invite.
Be Social!
Once you make the leap into Social Media Marketing, it’s important to engage. This means not only posting content for your followers to consume and (hopefully) share but also reacting to thoughts on your posts and responding to messages you receive. Let’s take the responding to messages part first, as it’s not that difficult.
A recent survey from market research firm Clutch shows that 83% of customers expect a direct message response within 24 hours. This can be easily achieved if you set your DM notifications to be routed to your normal email inbox. Also, you can use auto-response features to manage response expectations. The use of direct messages, however, is not a two-way street. Most social media users view unsolicited DMs as spam and if they get annoyed by it, they will report them which could lead to your ability to message to be suspended. Be prudent about using DMs to generate leads.
The more complicated question is how often you should post content. Opinions on this are as varied as the number of new blog posts which go up during any given week on the topic. One thing that is for certain is that posting
frequency differs depending on which Social Media Network you are using. Facebook, for example, requires fewer posts per day to be relevant than, say, Twitter. Begin your understanding of this by reading Louise Myers excellent article on the topic.
In our opinion, the answer should be driven by two variables. your ability to find time to post and your ability to share content that will be of value to your followers. As a small business owner, finding time can be tough so you need to be smart about it. One way to do this: use social media management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite which let you manage different social networks from one dashboard and also let you schedule posts. This allows you to take a one or two block of time each week to manage the content you will be posting.
With regard to that content, the first rule of thumb is not to share anything just for the sake of sharing something. You should view everything you post as providing value to customers and prospects. It should be a mix of “curated content” – info you find on the web which you think would be of interest, and original content – information you or someone in your company writes to inform or entertain your audience. The very first place you should consider here is your company blog. A good rule of thumb: is what I’m posting “shareworthy”.
A Marketing Communications Laboratory
If there is one constant about social media, it is that it is constantly changing. It seems there is always a new feature or algorithm to explore. Try keeping up with profile or cover image dimensions, for example!
While this may seem frustrating, if you stay flexible and take time to learn how new features work, you might find a fun, creative way promote your company you wouldn’t have otherwise considered. And users of social media understand this; they aren’t expecting everything to be polished and perfect. In fact, newer video features like Facebook Live or Instagram Stories have made more casual and less professional video feel more like the norm. So don’t be afraid to experiment and have fun with it.
Finally, to the extent possible, we recommend you keep your personal social media feeds separate from your professional profiles. In this unforgiving environment, a personal opinion might turn off a prospect or create a conversation you aren’t comfortable conducting within the framework of your business.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss using Social Media for your business, please be in touch.
Recent Comments