Are You Using Social Media to Its Full Potential?

Contributed by Steve Conway. 

In the digital age, entrepreneurs have an assortment of different choices for effective marketing. But, with online marketing taking over as the main means of reaching out to potential customers, failing to have a social media and online strategy in place for marketing can lead to devastating consequences and prevent a business from going very far. Simply owning a business social media account isn’t enough, either – today, brands need to be very active on social media and engaging with their customers and followers regularly via sites such as Facebook and Twitter and on apps such as Instagram and Snapchat. So, how do you know if you are using social media to its full potential? We’ve put together some top tips to help you achieve this:

Create Unique Content

Since social media is such an important tool in marketing, it’s no surprise that almost every business under the sun today, from small, local businesses to global corporations, has some sort of social media presence. Simply being on social media is no longer enough to impress your customers, as they’re expecting to be able to find you there along with all of your competitors. Once you’re on social media, this is where the real work starts – in order to stand out from the crowd, it’s down to you to make sure that you create unique, interesting content which will grab attention and engage users. A great example of a company who does this well is Sun Bingo; check out their unique and engaging Twitter campaigns to see what we mean.

Metrics and Analysis

Making sure that you receive regular feedback about your social media and web marketing campaigns will ensure that your company has the information that it needs to make improvements and understand what is going well and what could do with some work. When it comes to social media marketing, analytics are vital as they help you to keep up to date with the latest trends and customer demands, meaning that your social media site will be more current and able to keep up well with the competition. Along with using analytic data for feedback, you might also want to ask your customers directly for their ideas and opinions on improvement, for example through polls or asking them to leave comments.

Customer Engagement

Today, social media has become the go-to place for many people when communicating with various businesses and brands. Because of this, it’s not enough to simply set up a social media page and leave it there – monitoring social media for customer queries, messages, comments and mentions will help you to better communicate with your customer base and get to know them, their needs, likes and dislikes as well as possible. Along with that, this can also be very useful for your reputation as when you are readily available to customers through social media, this can significantly enhance their experience with your company overall and boost their satisfaction levels, even if they initially used social media to make a complaint!

Have a Specific Goal

When using social media, your main, specific goal should be to raise brand awareness. As with starting any business endeavour, having this goal in mind will help you to make the right decisions and also make it easier to plan out exactly how your social media campaigns will be managed and executed. Use of social media should use the personality and culture of the company and brand as a whole to promote the brand and create a unique character and ‘voice’ for branding. Along with this, another main goal of social media use should be to drive traffic to your site, therefore encouraging shareable content and using other social media sites to promote a primary one is important for achieving this.

Be as Social as Possible

Many brands make the mistake of only operating on one social media account. Whilst there’s still plenty of potential for engaging with customers and increasing brand awareness on social media sites such as Facebook, for example, businesses who don’t maximise their exposure by having a presence on every social media site available are often missing out considerably. Using a range of different social media sites to promote your brand will expose it to more potential customers, therefore making it easier to expand and grow your customer base.

Avoid Spam and Clickbait

Although using spam and clickbait type content can often seem appealing when trying to improve your social media presence and gain more followers, this can be very damaging to a brand’s reputation over time and therefore any results that it produces are usually only temporary. Because of this, business owners who are aiming for loyal customers who genuinely think highly of their company should avoid clickbait and spam at all costs. Not only can using spammy headlines, tricking customers into clicking on links by using clickbait and providing content that is of no or little value tarnish your reputation with your customers and make things difficult for your business in the future, it can also lead to you being blacklisted by Google and other search engines.

Social media is an excellent marketing tool, but many business owners are still failing to use it to its full potential. When using social media for business, it’s important to understand that in order to be successful, brands need to be regularly active with high quality content on social media and present across a variety of social networks.

Contributed by Steve Conway, a content marketing professional and inbound marketing expert. Previously, Steve worked as a marketing manager for a tech software start-up. He is passionate about discovering new software that will that will advance his already well-honed digital marketing techniques.

Photo Credit: Provide by Author with permission to use.