There’s no denying that in the modern age, social media is a significant part of people’s lives. According to The Telegraph the average person in the UK spends more than a day a week online, and if your customers are hanging out on the internet, you’re going to want to be there too.
Like any form of marketing, social media needs careful thought if it is to be used effectively for your business, so here are our top tips for maximising the potential of social.
1. Don’t let it take over your life
Particularly important if you are a one-man-band or a small team is making your social strategy manageable, otherwise you’re going to lose even more time to the internet than your customers do! Using a social media management system like Hootsuite allows you to schedule your posts in advance, and makes it easier to cross post across all your social networks, saving you time and energy. Then all you need to do on a day-to-day basis is keep up with any interactions on your social channels.
2. Don’t create separate social goals
The temptation with social is to start thinking about growing your followers and increasing your interactions as the main goal of your strategy, but how is that actually going to help your business? Like all forms of marketing, social media strategy works best if it is based on your business goals, so don’t get carried away with growing your followers unless there is a distinct business reason to do so.
3. Do use images
Posts with photos get the most shares on Facebook, and the most retweets on Twitter, and of course platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram are predominantly based around images. Creating images doesn’t have to be expensive, with most smartphones now having fairly high quality inbuilt cameras (pro-tip: go for the plus sized iphones which have two inbuilt cameras, and utilise the portrait function with its different lighting options), and platforms such as Canva offering fully customisable templates and stock images for free or at very low cost.
4. Definitely use videos
Video is an even more powerful tool than still images, with more than 500 million hours of video a day watched on YouTube alone. Video can be created inexpensively using a smartphone camera or your computer’s inbuilt webcam, and then upload for free to sites such as You Tube and Vimeo
Pro Tip: If you are going to spend money on video kit, spend it on lighting rather than a fancy camera!
5. Do use hashtags
On platforms with which they are compatible, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, hashtags are a powerful tool for getting your content noticed. Studies show that two hashtags per post is optimum, and it’s ideal if one of them is one already in use (so that people searching for it come across your content), and the other is a specific one to your own brand so that when the post is shared this increases your #exposure (see what we did there?).
6. Consider paid ads
While pop up ads, and especially ads that follow us around the internet, can be creepy and annoying, using targeted social ads can be really effective. In addition, some social networks such as Facebook, have algorithms which reduce the amount of visibility on your posts precisely in order to encourage you to pay to ‘boost’ your posts, so if you can’t beat ‘em you may as well join ‘em! In order to use paid adds effectively you should be as detailed as possible in your targeting so that you reach people who are going to be interested, rather than annoyed, by your ads. A good starting point for Facebook is to select the option ‘Friends of People who like my page,’ as you can assume that friends of your current followers may have similar interests, or they probably wouldn’t be friends in the first place!
The most important consideration when using social to grow your business, is that it isn’t the answer to everything. Even in the digital age, word-of-mouth marketing is still king.
