Get Your Social Media Working for You

Nowadays it seems exceptionally odd that there would be advertising without having a strong social media presence. Everyone from big businesses to individual self-promotion has accessed social media for free advertisement or paid side advertisement. You want to promote your business and have a strong social media campaign, but how do you make it the most effective to draw in clients and promote your products? This is a tricky task to engage and promote at the same time on social media when you are competing for attention among the thousands doing the same. This article will go over how to best get your social media working for you, cover the differences between engagement and promotion, and creating a unique brand that will help you stand out.

There are a number of ways to get your promotion off the ground on a social media marketing platform. Quickly, let’s cover social media most used for marketing. The most obvious promotion platforms are through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. What you may not be using is Snapchat, Pinterest, Foursquare and LinkedIn. Not using these platforms can damage your range of clients viewing time and can limit creative marketing. For instance, you can offer rewards for virtual check-ins through social media in Foursquare and have your clients use their pre-existing links to cross-post. This means if your customer has signed into foursquare they have most likely connected it to their other social media accounts (such as: Facebook and Twitter).

You can reward your customers with deals and special promotions for checking in on one and give them additional benefits if they cross share in other apps. Your customers are already taking pictures of products, foods, and in-store experiences, why not harness this marketing potential and in turn reward them to continue this practice and encourage their friends to do the same. Your online social media strategy should not be reliant on your users to promote your business. You should have vibrant cross-account pages that provide value to your marketing. Whether you are sharing expertise that comes from your industry through interesting stats or a fun post that reflects an engaged follower, all of this can help build your audience. Your posts can be about products and services, but they should be interesting and full of images, videos and phrases. In this line try not to use the same message over and over again, you want sincerity in your messages, and shouldn’t be the same on Facebook as they are on Pinterest. Look into what type of customer uses each platform and cater to that audience, if you aren’t sure, ask your customers.

Now that you are ready to write your social media campaign and blast it across the internet, let’s talk quickly about the difference between promotion and engagement, and how you can balance both. Promotion is about selling your product to your customer, you do not necessarily need customers to overly interact with those posts. But engagement is where social media marketing really takes off and can not only get people interested in your business but also create a stake in your company long-term. True engagement is when your customers share their opinions and experiences, which is what social media is all about! Try using your page to ask conversation-starter questions, ask your customers to discuss topics that may be relevant to your business. Make sure that your questions are framed in a way that they allow the customers to refer to your business if they are unsure about how they feel. Ultimately, the questions should redirect them back to you and your company’s robust profile that offers insight and opinions on all your company’s products and services. A good rule of thumb for social media campaigns, is engagement should be the focus for 80% of your posts, where only 10% should be a direct promotion.

Finally, let’s talk about personalizing your social media accounts so that your customers see a sincerity in your posts, and also so that you stay ahead of your competition. Creating catchy ads and videos that communicate your brand is going to get you noticed, and the easiest way to do this is to note your demographics interests. We’ve mentioned before that content marketing should provide value to your audience, the value can come in many different forms. One of the easiest ways to draw in clients and get them to see what your brand is about is creating a Pinterest board. These boards are rife with eye-catching visuals that can be re-pinned by your followers. The board will personalize what your brand is about, and shouldn’t be overloaded with just product pictures. Think: How does my product or service benefit my client, aesthetically how does it better their lives. Create or even re-pin visuals that communicate this and then through an online competition have your customers do the same, encouraging them to use your images to ‘style their lives’. When you are visually on the same page as your customers you are more likely to capture and keep their attention. Beyond that, humanize your company, have actual employees and customers provide quick testimonials to either the brand or a specific product, these can be written or even filmed, so that when you post it’s not just a company posting, it’s the people working hard behind the brand that the viewer connects to.

This may all seem like a lot of work for social media but businesses have reported a 72% growth in the effectiveness of their markets by going online. Without social media, vast amounts of your customers won’t know the story behind your brand and will go with competitors that better engage them in their products and services. It’s not all about brand awareness, though, when you get past just promoting and into engagement you will get invaluable customer input on your products. There are huge numbers that indicate the sheer amount of content going on social media every day, and more importantly, there is content behind those numbers, what do your customers like? What are they using in both photos and videos to represent their lives, and perhaps most importantly, how do they feel about your company? All this and more can be accessed through a well run social media campaign, and the time and effort reap high payoffs.