Social media platforms have created an entirely new way of marketing products and services. Big Fortune 500 companies have used social media to promote products and build their brand online. They have invested a lot of money on social media, which further emphasizes how important social media is for business and organization.
Social media is a double edged sword that can be negative for your product or business. You have to be careful because the things you post will affect your business in one way in another. What you post should reflect the things that you want your business to represent. Below are some tips that you can use in ensuring you maximize the use and effectiveness of social media.
Real-time Customer Engagement Platforms
One of the reasons why social media is effective for marketing is that it gives brands and businesses the chance to interact and easily engage with their customers with just a few clicks of a mouse. There are a number of tools out there that can be used to track conversations touching on your products or business. This goes a long way in helping you know what the customers are saying about your business and what you can do to be more effective and satisfy their needs.
Posting Time
When you use social media, you want to capture the attention of as many people as possible. There are certain times that are considered “prime” for posting. This is the time where your prospective clients log into their social media accounts to check if they have any new notification. These are the time you should be posting online. You cannot expect good results if you keep posting at midnight. The time you should be posting will be largely determined by the demographic group you are going to target.
For professionals, they mostly log in at 2. This is because most meetings take place between one and two. When they are going back to their desks, they usually check in to see if they have any new messages.
Find the time that your target clients usually login or interact online, and you will be able to reach more of them. Make sure you also factor in the difference in time if your business serves clients in different time zones. There are a number of tools that can be used to post at a given time, and the good thing is that it won’t cost you much.
Research Popular Content from Your Competitor
This will help you know what is popular with the audience of your competitor and colleagues. The topic they are posting about will most likely resonate with your clients. This should be seen as copying content, but crafting content around a similar topic, but making sure you use a different slant. There are tools such as social crawlytics that shows you what your competitors are posting, and how the posts are being shared. You will get to know the most shared keywords, and how you can use them to your advantage.
Limit Your Social Media Platforms
This is one of the mistakes many small businesses make online. There is no need to have a presence in many sites and fail to maintain and update the accounts. It is much better to focus on a few platforms and dominate it. A good number of platforms that you can focus on is three to four. There is no way you can establish a strong presence on many platforms unless you have a lot of money to spend on social media. The ultimate results might not be different from that you get when you use fewer platforms. Each platform has its own marketing plan, and making different plans for many platforms will take a lot of effort and time.
Why should you spend time on social media platforms that you are not sure if your audience is using and leave out the ones you are sure they are? Take some time and find out the platforms that your audience are using and focus on that. This alone will save you a lot of time and effort. Make sure you are up to date on the platform being used by your audience.
Use Platform Searches to Find Content to Share
Most social media platform offers a unique way of searching things online. This is a good tool for small businesses because they can easily use it to better serve their clients by providing insights into what the users of the platforms are mostly interested in. The search can also help you know where you can focus on to expand your business. Many of the search tools are free, and all you need to do is invest some time. Once you do this, you will start seeing some results.
Allow the Employees to Advocate for Your Business
This is one tool that many people don’t use to their advantage. Sharing content from your business account will make it seem that it’s all about business. When your employees become part of the campaign, you will have a bigger audience and make more sales. Employees are usually trusted more than the PR department or the CEO.
With more and more tools coming up, there are many things that change, staying on top of the game ensures you don’t fall back on the pecking order. There are also some tools that you can invest in to make your work much easier.
