Social media is just that, it’s social and it’s a media. We have all heard of a few of these social media sites, Facebook, Twitter and so on. And although they all started with the purpose of connecting friends and family they have become a businesses very best friend.
Social Media for business is now an essential tool for marketing.
We are constantly hearing how it can improve our online presence, increase traffic and result in bigger profits. Most of us understand the bigger profits and have a good idea what increased traffic means but if your skills lie in cooking a mean lasagna in the local Italian restaurant you may well not be too clued up with social media marketing.
Social media marketing put simply: chatting and posting on Facebook, big-ing yourself up on Twitter and telling everyone on Instagram how fantastic your products/service is. But to do this effectively you need to be consistent and engaging.
There are other social media platforms but we concentrate on these three as they are the big ones.
We offer a service aimed towards small business looking to promote their service or product using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Why bother?
Globally Facebook has over 2 billion active users and out of these it’s said there are around 30 million UK members online everyday.
That’s a hell of a lot of potential customers to tap into.
Most business have themselves a Facebook page, they are free and a great way to talk to your customers ‘face to face’ at least virtually.
Twitters’ UK membership list tallies to approx 12.6 million- that’s 20% of the population. It attracts people of all ages but notably is more popular with the under 37’s.
It gives us 280 characters to say what’s on our mind but a much more affective way to grab someone’s attention is with a picture. A picture says a thousand words.
Instagram has around 800 million users worldwide with 60% of them being under 34 but is presently one of the fastest growing social media platforms with memberships presently increasing by 100 million users a month!
*figures from feb 2018
Best thing is, these forms of advertising are FREE.
This is where the magical power of social media comes in to play.
First Step: Know your customer.
Most of us have I good idea of who our customer is, our ‘client persona’ and we know our product or the service we offer is the very best around. All we need to do is get others to hear about us and encourage them to come try us out for themselves.
By looking at the simple basic figures regarding membership of the different top three social media platforms it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see there are one hell of a lot of potential customers sitting in front of their computers or on their phones waiting for your eye-catching post to tell them you are just what they are looking for.
What to post?
So you know the group of people you want to target but what you put in your post will depend on what you want the outcome to be. Do you want to increase your businesses profile? If so, just tell people what you’re about and what good things you are up too. If it’s to get more customers into your restaurant on those quiet Tuesday evenings, offer a discount or free bottle of wine. Most of the time it’s simply telling people what you do, how you do it and where to find you.
Remember that this is social media and for it to work effectively you need to be social. Talk to your followers, answer comments and engage in conversations. All of the social media platforms want three things:
Engagement, Content and Consistency.
If you can provide these on your feed, the social media gods will like you.
Once you have your post.
Pop it on your timeline of your business page with a couple of hastags and a link to your website; share it to your own personal page. Ask your friends to like, comment and share. Share your post to relevant groups. Tag people, business or even a particular areas- anything that’s relevant to your business and that will attract your client persona.
It’s amazing how quickly word can spread.
And this is where I would love to say, ‘now sit back and watch the money walk in’, sorry but not quite. You have to keep going with it, build communication with these people. If someone makes a comment, answer them, engage. Your aim is to make everyone seeing your post know about your business. Don’t worry if only one or two people comment or like, there are many many more still watching and your potential customers will be seeing your conversation with others.
At Design My Post we offer social media marketing packages to suit all budgets as well as support and guidance, to find out more visit our Services page.
