How to Leverage Social Media for Your Business
More and more businesses owners and managers are embracing social media marketing as a effective tool to reach more customers. These tips can help you shape a plan that’ll get more results, engagements, and leads.
1. Content is STILL King
Your social media marketing will only be as effective as the content you share via social media channels. Social media strategy and content strategy go hand-in-hand; sharing more of your unique content typically leads to getting more visitors, conversions, and leads. Think of your online presence as a “tree” and the more “branches” you add in terms of content, the stronger your business will grow! Content can be text, plus photos and videos with text descriptors (search engines don’t recognize words that are embedded as part of an image). For more strategies, see Building a Social Media Following in Business and How Landing Pages Draw People to Your Site.
2. Get More Visual
Visual content has grown exponentially more popular as newer desktop and mobile devices provide superb appearance and quick page loading. We recommend that companies continually add more imagery to their websites and social media channels – photos, videos, illustrations, infographics, presentations, etc. – and suggest that this content be added over time. Rather than panic and start an upload frenzy, it’s better to add good visual content regularly, to keep your online presence fresh and interesting.
In addition to including images in Facebook and Twitter posts, visually-driven outlets like Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr are growing fast and may be effective depending on your industry, products, target audiences and other factors. Refer to What’s so Interesting About Pinterest? for pros & cons of this type of tool.
3. Be Informal yet Helpful
Leaders of many businesses believe messages from their company’s social media channels must be have the same formal, professional tone as their other communications. However, social media is about having conversations with others, and interacting on a more human level. Therefore, use a more casual and friendly (but still professional) voice, answer questions from users, and engage with followers.
Use relevant visuals to highlight and complement the text portions of your content. Images used in social media marketing should capture a user’s attention, elicit them to click to your website or another channel of your choice, stay with you, take action, and return! Here are some ideas for simple yet appealing content businesses can shares. If you’re lacking photos, they can be purchased from stock photography sites such as iStockPhoto, Shutterstock, or many others.
Example: Relevant Content + Visual + Helpful
Our video on online advertising and remarketing gives key points and uses visuals to help convey the message.