Ramping Up Your Business With Powerful Social Media Marketing

If you’re wondering whether you’re using social media effectively to grow your online business (or offline business) then this piece should help you.  Even if you’ve never done social media marketing before, or you find the idea daunting, we urge you to consider it as there’s no doubt your audience is using it!  Did you know that almost 5 billion people across the globe access social media every day?  Your audience is on there, and if you’re not visible, you won’t be able to reach a wider audience – plus you could be losing out to your competitors.

With this guide, you’ll quickly understand why you need to use social media marketing for your business, and you’ll understand what it’s all about as well as what you need to do. Simply start by having a social media calendar.

Let’s move on!

Do You Know What Social Media Marketing Is?

Before we get to the nitty gritty of social media marketing, let’s quickly recap on what it means.

Social media marketing involves all of your activity on social media channels and it’s about elevating your business to reach new audiences.  There’s a lot of different ways to do this.  First, you need to build your business profiles and make sure that you know how to get verified on Instagram, if that’s your platform of choice.  Next, it’s about ensuring that your activity on social media is powerful enough to reach your audience but it’s not as hard as you think!  There are lots of tools and features available to help you build a community and get your brand in front of the right audience.  For example, most social media channels offer business accounts access to audience insights, so you learn about your customers.  There’s also advertising options and for low-budget businesses, these advertising opportunities are worthwhile.  You can get your products or services right in front of your customers and convert them into paying customers!

There are other options to monetize your content.  Facebook and Instagram allow businesses to build their own shopping pages and of course, you can link your website too.  Perhaps you want to use the power of Influencing to build your brand? 

Most platforms have emojis, stickers and filters to dress up your posts and some use video and Live TV to increase your exposure.  Plus, it’s easy to see what your competition is up to as you can just track their account.  There’s really a wealth of opportunity to promote your brand on social media channels but before you dive in, you need to carefully think about the social media platforms you want to use.  We’ve got the info below. Before moving have you ever tried campaigning via e-mail marketing? It’s a perfect space for business.

What Are the Best Social Media Platforms?

Of course, there are so many social media platforms to choose from but it’s best to research each first before trying it out.  Make sure it’s got your audience on there and try it out for a few months before deciding whether it’s useful or not.  If not, deactivate it and try a new channel, you can always revisit it at a later date.

Facebook

This is still a powerful social media platform and has more than 2 billion people using it every day.  It’s particularly popular with Millennials and Gen Z audiences.  Use Facebook for business to business and business to consumer content and take advantage of its many features.  Facebook provides insights for business users and has shopping channels so you can build a shop.  There are emojis, stickers, filters, and advertising mechanics as well as the ability to create groups and build a community for your brand.

TikTok

The popular video platform famous for short-form video messages has grown rapidly since its launch a few years ago and has over 1 billion active users.  It’s audience is mainly Gen X, but older people do use it.  Use it for business to consumer content to get your message across in a fun, engaging and entertaining way.

Twitter

With over 220 million daily users, Twitter is the place people turn to for quick-fire news, opinion, and politics.  However it’s still used for other purposes too and lots of businesses now use it as an effective customer services channel.  The audience is Millennials and skews slightly male.  If you have something to say and want to keep it brief, Twitter’s for you.

SnapChat

This is another younger generation social media platform that uses short messages, images, and emojis/stickers to reach other users.  The messages disappear over a short period of time.  It’s popular though and has over 1 billion daily users.  It’s best for business to consumer content.

LinkedIn

This is a purely professional social media channel that’s for businesses and business individuals to network, perhaps even find their next career move.  With over 770 million users, it’s popular and stretches across audiences.  It’s best for business to business (B2B) use.

Pinterest

This social media platform focusses on virtual pinboards.  Users create themes and then pin images to their boards and share them with others. Pinterest attracts a Baby Boomer audience (400 million people use it every day) and is good for business to consumer content.

More Reasons Why You Should Be Using Social Media for Your Business

• It builds brand awareness.
• It gives you access to audience insights, such as behavior, location, gender, job title, marital status etc.
• It’s easy to find prospects and turn these into paying customers.
• You can create your own online community and leverage it to build relationships with your customers.
• Done well and it an achieve brand loyalty.
• You can speak directly to your customers.
• You can monetize your social media content.
• You can keep an eye on what your competitors do.
• It’s good to spot gaps in the market.
• You can use it to advertise your products and services.
• You can link your other online platforms, such as your website or blog.

Next – Create Your Social Media Strategy

The next step in the process is to create your social media strategy and your social media calendar Both of these documents should run side by side.

Your social media strategy should be a simple document of approximately 1 to 2 pages long.  It should list your social media goals and the activity you’re planning to reach those goals.  Keep it brief, you can write down more detail on separate documents for each goal.

The document and calendar should span a time period, we would suggest minimum 3 months, maximum 12 months.  Do revisit your documents regularly to track your performance and also to change things, perhaps add more activities or remove some.  Remember, it doesn’t have to be set in stone and should be an evolving exercise.

Moving Onto Social Media Content

To reflect each of your marketing goals, you’ll need content, and this is a careful process that needs to be considered as you need your content to be:

• Relevant to your brand.
• Engaging and interesting.
• Intriguing – encouraging your followers to click through.
• Professional, so it’s slick and if not, your followers won’t be impressed with your business!
• Have emojis, filters and relevant tags so it pops!
• Be informative, but fun (it’s social media after all!).
• Be as unique as possible.

You can also schedule your posts using your platform’s scheduling tool or find one online.  This means you free yourself up to concentrate on other areas of your business, safe in the knowledge that your profile has content ready to go for the coming days.  Don’t over post though.  Followers won’t appreciate multiple posts in one go and it can even put them off so much that they click unfollow.  Post 3 or 4 times a day and space it out.  Too many posts could end up with your account being shadowbanned.  Don’t forget to use the insight tools on your social media platform to track your social media marketing performance.

The Last Word On Social Media Marketing

Always start with one social media platform and get that just right before moving onto the next one. Keep tracking your performance so you know what you’re doing well and what needs work.  Don’t forget to tell everyone that you’re on social media and ask them to follow you by sending an email from your business account.