Utilizing Social Media to Market Your Business
When the phrase “Social Media” comes to mind, the first immediate thoughts are that of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Four Square and countless other platforms online users subscribe to daily. Most often than not, their responses are followed by, “What is that and why should I use it?” Using it and not using social media can be the underlying factor of your brand or business advancing with today’s ever changing technology.
However, using social media to market your brand, if utilized correctly can not only build clientele but it can build a community, communication, and character. When used correctly, your main objectives should be to build and strengthen your brand, communicate to your existing and future audience base, and drive that audience to take some type of action. Whether that action is to buy your product, sign up to your newsletter or blog or simply follow you, these are the actions that develop a brand’s social media presence.
Let’s take a closer look at these areas and how they might apply to your social media efforts.
Objective #1: Build and Strengthen Your Brand
When it comes to building and reinforcing your brand, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It gives you the strongest and broadest opportunity to both find your target audience and to engage in conversation with them.
These days, you have no choice but to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Ways to do is to think about the specific qualities that make your company different from your competitors. By building your awareness on what makes you different, you can use social media as a soapbox to announce to your audience.
If you’re a service professional, target a specific niche and build a blog and Twitter strategy around that. Demonstrate your expertise in working with a certain type of client and then seek out those types of clients to have conversation with. Look for new ways to connect with them and encourage your current clients to socially share your articles with their networks.
Objective #2: Actively Communicate to your Existing and Future Audience Base
Social media is about increasing the conversation about your brand. This makes social media platforms prime outlets for PR driven companies who want to know what customers are saying about them. Setting up even a baseline of social media monitoring systems can go a long way toward helping you follow these conversations. Whether you’re launching new products and aiming to get people buzzing about it or trying to reach out to a new target audience to share information about one of your best selling services, the actions taken by others can be tracked to help you know more about your customers.
Objective #3: “CTA” Creating Your Call to Action
One of smartest reasons to use social media is for the potential boost it can have to your conversion efforts. Whether you’re looking to drive sales, increase leads or simply drive people to action, conversions can be virtually tracked.
Obvious options like buying your products or becoming a lead spring to mind, but don’t forget about other valuable actions like subscribing to your newsletter, retweeting a blog post or downloading a white paper.
An exercise highly encourage to try is to make a list of ways you think about the different ways you might be able to use social media to increase conversions for each item. Often times, this is the best way to start planning your social media efforts.
Objective #4: Using Hootsuite – for those who feel like we do not have the time
All of these social media outlets can seem overwhelming at first, but there are options for those of you who feel as though there just isn’t enough time in the day. For those of your who can not keep up, there is a website Hootsuite that allows you to schedule your social media messages. You can schedule your tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates and more! So take a few minutes out of your day to plan and schedule your posts. And in case you were wondering, Hootsuite is a free-service with upgrade options. Remember that you may have to curb your message to your audience in different Social Media outlets. Those fans you may have on Facebook may be slightly different from your Twitter followers – so your message should match your audience. Finally, remember this note “quality over quantity”. Do not post dozens of messages without substantial content that will appeal to your audience simply because you want to have an abundance of posts. Actions like these, will eventually overwhelm your audience and may lead to an “unlike” or “unfollow”. Keep it simple and substantial! Know get to it!
The Objectives Have Been Made, Now Start Building Your Social Media Plan
Reviewing your business’ social media approach with each of the above objectives in mind helps you set the stage for your social media efforts. The blueprint in trying to get you to figure out why you want and need to start utilizing social media to market your brand is already laid out. Now start building!