In today’s marketing world, social media is seen as a great marketing tool that can reach a wide variety of audiences, plus, it’s free to use. However, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to get the results you want. Several key factors play a big part in making your social media strategy successful.
In 2019, JSDesigns held a free social media seminar, providing a few tips and tricks to help businesses in the Downtown Plano Arts District get the most out of their social media platforms. Businesses ranging from a Mexican Cantina and Grill, to an Art Studio attended our seminar, emphasizing the importance of learning the skills and then applying them to their own business model.
The seminar addressed the following things:
1. Why you should use social media
Social media can make or break a business (or sometimes both!). According to recent research from MDG Advertising, only 20% of businesses measured the impact of social media on their bottom lines. A whopping 44% do not know if social media is working for them. In fact, a particular study provides an even clearer picture: 62% of small businesses report that Facebook ads aren’t working for them. Why should a business have a social media account?
Be more involved with their customers
It has become the standardized “extra mile” for connecting with customers
Generate revenue and increase sales
Develops customer trust
An easy way to receive feedback from customers which leads them to believe that the business cares about their opinion
2. What social sites should be used?
Multiple social media sites are waiting to be utilized. However, the task of picking the right ones and handling various accounts can be daunting. Before anyone should sign up for an account, they should ask the following questions:
What are your social media goals?
Which social media platforms are your targets using the most?
How many resources (employees, time etc.) do you have available to dedicate to social media?
What type of content are you prepared to share regularly?
What do you want to accomplish through social media?
What brand awareness did you want to create?
Are you trying to get your customers more involved with your brand via commenting, liking and sharing
One of the social media channels we use is Instagram because we can aesthetically display our work, culture, and case studies.
Why use Facebook?
Facebook is the most popular social media network, with a total of 2.6 billion worldwide. It’s easy to customize your business page to let your customers know your contact information, hours of operation, and services offered. Facebook has a powerful call-to-action advertising tool that allows you to target a specified audience based on age, location, and hobbies. Customers can easily interact with your business through events, check-ins, sharing, tagging, commenting, polls, and submitting reviews. After you get your customers engaging in your content, you can analyze what content is working best through Facebook’s insight tool.
Create call-to-action ads with your own customized buttons to redirect the audience to a landing page
Why use Instagram?
In 2018, Instagram reached 1 billion users worldwide, making Instagram one of the world’s most popular apps. You will have to have a Facebook account to create an Instagram account. It’s a great app to display your artistic niche posts, stories, highlights, and polls. The app is a photo and video-heavy app, with over 35% of users aged between 25-34 years old. Like Facebook, you can customize contact buttons and target advertisements to get the audience you want. Using meaningful hashtags on your content can also direct customers to find you. If you want to see how much engagement your posts, stories, and polls, are getting, there is an insight tab which updated weekly to show you stats.
Use insights to discover which posts are getting the most traffic and what your audience demographics are
Why use Twitter?
With 330 million monthly active users and 145 million daily users, Twitter has become a must-have app for news and entertainment. Twitter has become a great customer support channel due to being a real-time app, with at least 60% of consumers expect an answer within an hour. You can make an impactful tweet that falls under the 240 character limit or interact with others through commenting and retweeting. If your business has a playful and witty side, Twitter can attract audiences through video, images, links, polls, and more.
Twitter advanced search picks up the keywords from the tweet’s copy and hashtags
3. How to go about doing it right
Although each social media platform is different, they all have common tips and tricks to ensure that you get the most out of your social media platform. The following factors help get impactful results:
Stick to 2-3 accounts that can be updated continuously
Fill out all of your bio
Don’t assume this is your only source of marketing
Rule of thirds – 1/3 promotional messaging, 1/3 articles on relevant topics, and 1/3 encouraging audience engagement
Strategically plan your content with a month to month planner/spreadsheet (we love using Hootsuite!)
Develop a campaign through action-gate, incentives, and prize relevant posts
Drive traffic through target ads and hashtags and don’t be afraid to re-target an ad
Convert leads from mailing lists and gated content
Market analyze what your audience likes most through stat tracking
4. How to NOT do it
As I said earlier, social media can make or break a business. Here a few things you shouldn’t do with your social media:
Use it just for advertisements
Post too many times a day
Spam the hashtag feature
Leave your bio empty
Ignoring follow requests or complaints
Post without a message or general intent
Remove or edit customer’s comments and reviews
Collect user information through gated content without content
Use your personal account to promote your business
5. Security
With around 5.4 billion fake accounts being taken down by Facebook in 2019, social media security has increasingly become more important to have. Here are a few tips and tricks to ensure you are practicing good social media security measures:
Use a company email for accounts
Enable multi-factor authentication
Avoid password reuse
Blacklist/block malicious URLs and IPs
Don’t overshare on company information
If you’re hacked, let the public know
Only listen to notifications from the site itself, don’t click on weird links
Update your security settings on all channels regularly
*Takes a deep breath* yes I know, that was a lot, so we decided to condense everything into this free social media infographic for you to download. However, it’s essential that if you choose to market your business through social media, you should first learn the basics. Although social media may take a lot of time and planning for it to be successful, it’s really worthwhile.
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