Using social media is a proven method to market your business online. When used well, these B2B social networks platforms can boost your business by increasing your brand’s visibility. There is no better way of gaining customers’ trust and building relationships than using social platforms.
Here are three essentials that will help you tap into your online market and leverage your business through social media.
1. Choose the best platforms to suit your brand
There’s one basic rule for positioning your business through social media. You don’t have to be on every platform! Find out where your ideal customers hang out and reach out to them there. If you’re on multiple platforms, you will need to adjust your social media strategy so you post the right type of content on the right platform.
Here are some of the ideal business uses for each of the major social media platforms.
Facebook
- Cost effective, targeted, strategised marketing
- Versatility of uses – pages, groups, videos, automated messaging, shop, events etc.
- Personal interact with customers
- Increase traffic to website and track/follow/market to visitors
- Data, stats and reporting capabilities
Twitter
- See what’s happening
- Get noticed
- Start conversations
- Increase engagement
Instagram
- Younger market
- Visual branding – eg for fashion, retail, hospitality and creative industries
- Build loyal following, engagement and brand identity
- Behind the scenes look into your business
- Use hashtags to increase brand visibility and awareness
- Direct shopping through link in business bio
- Collaboration through cross marketing
LinkedIn
- B2B and professional social networking
- Launch and promote new products
- Build and strengthen business relationships
- Keep up to date on your industry
- Reach decision makers
2. Leverage your brand through social media influencers
Social media is a community. It’s the perfect place to meet, connect, engage and collaborate all in the comfort of your office chair! However if you’re a start-up or new to social media it can be hard to build a following; you only have so many friends, family, team members and customers to invite to your business page or profile.
That’s where social influencers come in!
We’re all ‘influencers’ and we’ve all been influenced to – many times. It’s nothing more than telling people about a particular brand you’ve had a great experience with. In offline language, it’s the endorsement, recommendation, testimonial, or shout out.
Social media influencers have pulling power – and they know it. They have large followings who ‘know, like and trust’ them. If you tag a well-connected personality or brand on Instagram and they choose to add you to their feed, your post could potentially reach their thousands, or millions of followers.
Influencers provide the fast-track way to leverage your brand. Large companies invest vast amounts of time and money to find them with influencer marketing being a key strategy today because of its high success rate.
3. Create quality content to engage your following
The most common cry of businesses when it comes to social media is ‘what do I post?’ Once you’ve told everyone what you do, what’s left to say? The important thing to remember is it’s not about constantly ‘selling’ to your clients (or potential clients) rather, it’s about building relationships.
Speak in the language of your business and in the language of your customer. Post topical, relevant content and make sure you comment, share, repost and respond openly and frequently.
What’s the best when it comes to images?
Social media camps are divided on whether to use professional, high quality images or to make your posts more feel more ‘real.’ Ideally it’s a combination of both.
The latest smart phones make it easy to capture, edit, crop and share great photos. Make sure it’s not an old phone or your photos may appear grainy or pixelated – not a good look!
Use stock images sparingly if you can’t get a quality photo in your business.
Online programs such as Canva make it easy for a novice to create stunning looking posts that fit the size requirement of each platform. You’ll also need to resize your image for posting onto the various platforms, unless you use something like Canva that does it for you.
After you upload to the platform, make sure you check the cropping so you don’t lose important content. Then you’re ready to post and share... and tag those social influencers!
For more tips on Social Media for business, check out one of our previous posts "What to post on Social Media here >>>
You can find more great tips in our free eBook Digital Business Essentials. Download now and learn how to continue attracting new customers and growing your market share while evolving your skills as a business leader.
