Digital marketing has come a long way over the last couple of years and social media now play a crucial role in helping small businesses grow. But many entrepreneurs and small-business owners struggle with finding the best way to use social media for engagement and business promotion. This is because they fail to understand that it’s all about using valuable content to engage just the right audience and instead, use social media for shameless self-promotion. Here are some of the most important aspects of using social media to promote your business and increase engagement.
Grow your channels as early as possible
Waiting for a product or service launch to create a social media account is a missed opportunity at best and a bad business move at worst. Instead, try to build and grow your social media presence as early as you can in the marketing cycle. Sure, this profile can and eventually will be used for product promotion, but you can also use it to solidify your brand image and establish a connection both with your target audience and with other industry professionals. Alternatively, you can share insightful information related to the specific industry you operate in and become a treasure trove of interesting and valuable information.
Use more than one channel
Different users prefer different social media platforms. Following this simple logic, it becomes clear that the entire target demographic cannot possibly be reached by using a single media channel. Facebook and Twitter might be the most popular platforms, but people also use Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and YouTube. You don’t have to use every single platform these are, but then again, you don’t have to limit yourself to a single channel of communication.
Engage your audience
Engagement is a crucial part of any well-developed social media marketing strategy. Posting interesting and useful content is important, but so is encouraging your audience to interact with that post by leaving a comment, liking or sharing it. One of the easiest ways to increase the chance of your audience engaging the content you share is to simply ask for their opinion. Questions are great at grabbing attention and sparking up conversations. Just make sure to be active in the comment section, answer any question your customers might have for you.
Share at just the right times
Each social media platform has a specific time-frame when it experiences the most traffic. This is called peak traffic and posting during that specific window of time guarantees that your posts will be viewed and engaged with by the largest number of people possible. There are numerous infographics available online that detail the best time to post on various social media. However, the best option would be to take that info with a grain of salt and actually do some testing in order to find out what time works best for your social media profiles.
Use platform-oriented content
One the most important things about sharing content is to make custom content for each platform. Try to have different headlines, images, and descriptions for each platform and make sure to use the customizable posting feature each of them has to offer. Your headline should be attention-grabbing, pictures relevant or interesting and the description needs to be short and compelling. Using this simple formula, you can lure readers into clicking on your posts. Don’t shy away from using hashtags, as they make your content more discoverable.
Use images and graphic media
Adding an image to a social media update can actually increase the number of likes, shares and retweets. When presented with a text and an image, our eyes are naturally drawn towards the image. Instead of using boring old brand-featuring images to add to your posts, you should try to outline the most important parts of the text by using a separate image to represent each part. If you plan on using images from the internet, make sure to only use free stock images and photos that are available for commercial use. This ensures that you won’t get into any legal issues due to copyright infringement.
Social media has slowly but surely become a powerful tool for business promoting. The only problem is that most marketers fail to use that tool to its full potential. They choose shameless self-promotion over providing value. In truth, out of all the posts you share, 90% should be relevant, informative content and only 10% should be invested in business promotion.
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