We know that small business owners to comprehend the importance of social media in engaging with customers and improving conversion but often lack the expertise of incorporating digital marketing resources into their businesses.
Let’s have a look at 5 5 quick tips on how you can refine social media for your business:
TIP #1- Identify your target audience
Every market has an audience and no matter what your business caters to, there is most likely a community of people hungry for your content or the value your service offers. This is why part of your marketing plan should be to identify who is your main target audience, and integrate yourself into those communities so that you learn their patterns and their needs. Linkedin groups and meetups are a good way to start.
TIP #2 Have a marketing plan
Once you’ve identified your target audience, put together a solid marketing plan for ways to get their attention and drive them to interact with your product or service. As an example, setup 3 micro-goals, such as getting 100 followers on Twitter, 100 likes on Facebook and 100 email subscribers for your newsletter. There are tons of resources online that teach you how to get to those micro-goals. If you feel you are stuck getting there, stop, re-evaluate and change some of your tactics until they work.
TIP #3 Engage with your audience
Make sure you open up a two-way communication between you and your audience. Talking about how awesome you are all the time will not get you anywhere. Instead engage your fans with things like: motivational quotes, pop quizzes, jokes, trivia questions or funny cats videos. Once your audience interacts with you, organically their friends and followers start to notice you which ultimately should translate into more likes and followers.
TIP #4 Stay on top of your online reputation
If you are running a local business, your online reputation is very important in acquiring new customers. People are relying on recommendation search more than ever and a lot of purchasing behaviours are based on what others are saying about you. Make sure you monitor your online reviews consistently by using review tracking tools . And when the dreadful feedback of doom shows up on your monitor, do not panic! Most review sites let you reply to the original post, so you can address the user and redeem yourself.
Tip #5 Get a widget
Put a widget up on your site for your social networks. The best place to find followers is your own blog or site. Also, it’s much easier to get your readers and friends to vote or retweet your content than strangers. Adding a widget next to your content can help.
Facebook has a widget generator you can use, and InstaSocial offer a free twitter widget which is easy to add to your site (or if you are an Instaprise Solutions client, they will even do both for you for FREE!)
Tip #6 Don’t worry about follower counts
Forget all the spammy ebooks out there that sell you the notion that you can attract thousands of followers in a matter of days. Of course, youcould do that and it’s not hard – you could even buy 10,000 in a single day! But the types of followers who are going to be following you are mostly bots. Or they’re just following you in hopes that you’ll follow them back. Ultimately, they aren’t followers who would engage with you and if you subsequently decide to boost your social marketing with advertising – you will end up paying for these disengaged followers. You want social media followers that are going to listen and interact with you, and 10 of those followers is worth more than a thousand bots. In this case quality is definitely more important than quality!
Tip #7 Find people within your niche to follow on Twitter and Facebook
The ideal follower on Twitter and Facebook is one that has similar interests within your niche. You can find like-minded people to follow on both these social media platforms by searching for keywords. Once you’ve started following these people, start interacting with them. Participate in discussions, and retweet and share things they say that would be helpful to your community.
Not only will this method help build your follower counts, it also gives you more influence within your niche. You’ll find great friends that will help you promote your content and site too. Always remember to give first and ask later.
Tip #8 To make life easy, manageable and consistent….. Automate
Once complaint of people whom follow SME’s is the lack of consistency and that small businesses simply stop posting! This is brand damaging and is easily avoided by Automating your posting! Now people whom know me will appreciate that I am a geek about technology and automation which was my driver for adding InstaSocial to the Instaprise Soutions offering! which features our Insta Social Dashboard, enabling you to see all social media interaction in one place with a single login, our dashboard is easy to use and intuitive, which works smoothly on desktop, tablet & mobile. It also allows you to build a “library” to find relevant news and material to save you time on researching what’s happening in your sector and, of course, allows you to measure best performing content / hashtags, find optimal times of day to post & easily reschedule most successful content
At Instasocial we firmly stand by the three B’s
Be selective. Be precise. Be consistent.
