Social Media is a powerful tool for growing your business. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat have provided businesses with another method for targeting various markets. In this blog post, we focus on how you can leverage these platforms to grow your business.
Step 1: Set Up Social Media Accounts
While this may seem like an obvious step, it is one of the most important. We recommend using the same email address when setting up your social media accounts to make sure things are consistent. Depending on the platform, you will also need to have a business logo, cover photo and a short description of what you do.
Other important details include adding your website and opening/closing hours. Most social media platforms offer the option to ‘verify’ your account. Verification is important for your brand’s reputation. It adds a level of authenticity, adds credibility, avoids confusion and (according to Facebook) will result in your page showing higher in search results.
Step 2: Implement Social Sharing Buttons
One way of increasing the reach of your website content is to implement social share buttons. Social sharing buttons such as the Facebook Like, Facebook Share, LinkedIn Share, or Retweet button can entice people who find your content useful to share it with their friends and connections. This can have a great effect on the exposure of your website content. From an SEO perspective, social sharing is also a good indicator to search engines that your content is valuable to people.
Step 3: Engage With People Using Social Media
If a person chooses to follow your account, it’s because they identified that you offer some kind of value to them. A core part of social media is engagement. Yes, it is important to share promotional information but at the same time, people do not appreciate being bombarded with advertising on their feeds all the time.
Being active and engaging with your followers is great for building brand reputation. You can ask questions about things that relate to your business. For example, if you are a resort in Hawaii, you can ask your followers what their favourite activity to do in Hawaii is. If you sell DIY products, you can ask your followers what their favourite DIY project was. Get creative and brainstorm what you can ask people to drive engagement. You’ll get an idea of what works through trial and error. Make sure you also like the comments and reply as this will help drive the conversation.
Step 4: Utilise The Advertising Tools And Grow
Advertising is an important part of social media success. This is particularly true when you first set up a new account. Growing your following organically (using non-paid methods) can be done but it is difficult.
Unless you are fairly well known, for platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn it can be extremely difficult to grow a large following from zero. There are advertising campaigns that you can run such as the ‘Engagement: Page Like’ campaign. This is a good way of promoting your page and gaining followers. You can set a budget for as little as $20 a week or up to as much as you feel comfortable. Get in touch with Pure SEO if you would like more information about social media marketing strategies.