Social Media

Social media is an extremely accessible method of customer outreach for businesses, though it does not guarantee success on its own. There is a distinct difference between social media accounts with zero promotion for the business or no follower base.

Determining which social media platforms to use is an important first step for businesses. In this age of social media, it is imperative to identify where your potential customers spend time the most. It is unwise to post on five social media apps inconsistently, and it this will likely be more damaging than strategically avoiding social media.

Consistency plays a large role. Building an audience requires regular posts, which can be as little as a couple times a week. If a business posts sporadically and with long periods of no posting, it does not promote audience growth.

To post content with high engagement on social media, businesses should avoid polished promotional posts. Presenting behind-the-scenes content of your business, customer reviews, or any content with your business’s persona shows more personality and is generally more engaging than content created solely for the promotion of sales.

Constant sales content will turn customers away.

Building and maintaining a community on social media is as important as the actual content creation. Engaging directly with your followers, replying to comments, and answering questions builds a community around your brand.

The best way to build a community is to gather inspiration from your competitors. Observe their content and strategies on social media to determine what content gaps exist that are within your abilities to fill. In fact, some of the best content ideas derive from observing what is currently lacking in the market.

Social media is one of the largest outlets for business advertising that requires the most work, but it does not have to be perfect from the start. Time and effort being put into social media advertising gives space for businesses to develop their branding and unique advertising voice alongside their loyal audience.

Social media and your business

Lia

If you run your own business, then it’s always wise to make yourself as visible to the public as possible. This all helps with brand recognition and promoting your business. One great way to do this is by using social media. Some people choose to use a company to create and manage their social media accounts, however, this can be quite costly. One way of keep costs down can be to manage your social media accounts yourself. This can be quite time consuming, and you may need to do some research to ensure that the things that you post help promote your company. You wouldn’t want your posts to have a negative effect on your brand or be cause for someone to complain.

It’s a good idea to check out your competition, see what sort of topics they post about and see the effects their posts have on their client base.

A good post to use on social media can be posting reviews from previous customers, these are great promotional tools and will help you engage with new potential customers.

You may also want to run competitions or prize draws from your page that involve people ‘liking’ and ‘following’ your page to be in with a chance of winning.   

Can you Get Sales Through Social Media?

Christina

Social media is a powerful tool for marketing. It has lots of capabilities and is something that every business really should be engaging with. However, you have to have a realistic view of its capabilities and understand what it can and cannot do.

Firstly, social media is not a sales tool. It isn’t ever going to achieve big sales for you, because people don’t use it to buy – they use it to socialise. They want to see the social, fun side of your brand, rather than being bombarded by sales messages. A sales message will drive people away, whereas fun and relevant content will get people to engage with you.

Social media can help you sell but it is more indirect. It helps to make your brand memorable by making it human, giving it a side that people can’t see in the shops. This helps increase brand loyalty and keeps you relevant to customers.

Marketing Through Facebook – Effective Online Campaigns

Christina

Facebook has a highly-customisable advertising platform for their customers to use, which will give you lots of flexibility. It will allow you to place advertisements in people’s timelines and on third party websites to make them aware of you and your products or services. Facebook advertising can really work for you if you design and target your ads carefully. Here are some of the reasons why Facebook can be good:

• You can edit you advert to make it look just right visually. Use different images and customise and crop them.
• The targeting options work on a local or international level. Target people wherever you want to. Tell them about a local shop or about your global brand.
• So many people use Facebook. You can tap into a huge market by choosing Facebook advertising.
• Target people based on their interests. This is how you can get the most relevant audience for your ads.

The Importance of a Google Place Listing

Christina

If your business has an actual physical location, then one of the first things you need to do to promote your business is to use Google Places. This service enables you to get listed on Google Maps. It sounds so simple, but the benefits are profound.

Here are three main reasons why we think Google Places is extremely important for your business:

1.It’s cheap. All you need is a little bit of time and effort to set up your business profile, and that’s it. There’s no fee to use this service, because it’s a free service offered by Google.

2.It gives you an online presence. If you have a small business and you don’t have a website of your own just yet, then your Google Places listing can function as your website.

3.You can provide information about your business. You can put your business name, description, phone number, and location on your listing. It’s very much like being listed in the Pages except that the listing is on the Web. You can also add other relevant info, including photos and YouTube videos.

RSS Dead

Christina

It’s been said for a while that Google killed their Google Reader product that RSS was dying (despite others arguing to the contrary), and warned bloggers and businesses that they should be finding other mediums, such as email, to replace that consumption format and ensure continued traffic and readership to their blogs. Sure enough, if you read Google trends, you would know that a natural interest in RSS fell by at least 50% back in 2013. People simply aren’t using RSS readers any more, and I’d argue if you even mention “RSS” people won’t even know what you’re talking about. RSS isn’t social. You can’t reply via RSS. You can’t share via RSS. Only social is social and Facebook just opened that (using “open” very loosely) to the entire web.

With Facebook’s new Save Button for the web businesses can now copy and paste simple code into their articles and allow those articles to be saved to Facebook for the user to read later. Now users can read all their favorite articles in one place in an environment over 1 billion people are already familiar with: Facebook.