This article lists the top five tips for businesses when it comes to utilising social media platforms.
Why Social Media?
Social media is great for many reasons, whether to increase awareness of your business or to use it to produce quality user generated content and boost your SEO rankings, this is a platform that can really catapult a business to the next level.
Before just signing up to social networks left, right, and centre, what do you need to know?
Where Does Your Audience Gather?
A recent study has shown that a lot of marketing professionals are not using Pinterest to promote their business. While this may sound silly, as Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social platforms, the fact remains that the site is popular among Mother’s in the 26 – 40 age demographic. Therefore, not wasting time targeting Pinterest if that is not your target market is a pretty smart idea.
The message here is to target the social networks that are most widely used by the people you are trying to sell to.
Listen
The most common feature of social networks is to have thousands of people on a proverbial soap box, pontificating about all manner of things in life.
Rather than treating social networking simply as your chance to unleash a torrent of content and links on the world, take the time to also listen and understand the needs of your customers and target audience.
Respond Quickly
One key part of listening is to acknowledge that you are. While one approach favoured by many businesses is to generally post “Thank you for all of your suggestions,” it is far better to respond to each one individually.
As your business grows, this will not be possible, so that is when your general communications come in. If you receive 10 private messages or tweets per day, however, you will be easily able to respond to each one personally, even if it is a simple “Thank You.”
Be Human
This is by far the biggest tip and also the one that many businesses still fail to follow. Corporate speak, being cold and aloof, and failing to engage well with your audience is not going to help you. To this end, be careful if you are using automated software to create your content, as it is often obvious that it is computer generated and will interest no-one.
Give People a Reason to Read Your Content
As well as marketing your product, offer advice and top tips so people gain the added value from following you on social sites. Perhaps schedule a weekly Q&A over a couple of hours, or set up any software with human written tweets on a daily basis giving advice relevant to your business.
This article has been written by a member of the Bough SEO social media team. Bough SEO is a digital marketing consultancy that specialises in delivering online visibility for a number of clients.
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