Most business owners acknowledge that social media can be a highly effective avenue for advertising a business, building a base of clients, and developing a reputable brand. Some business owners, however, have no idea where to start. Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, and Twitter are just some of the social media platforms available, each with a different audience and format.
This article will give an overview of where to start as a business owner looking to generate clients and customers from social media.
Start with 1 or 2 Channels
It is possible to test the waters with each social media platform, especially if you are willing to outsource some of the work or employ a full-time social media manager. If not, you may want to focus on two social media platforms that are likely to be the most relevant and effective.
For example, if you are in the business-to-business niche, LinkedIn may well be the best platform to use. If you work in fitness, then consider using Instagram and Youtube.
LinkedIn right now can be highly effective. While Facebook doesn’t provide the organic reach that it did back in 2021, Linkedin is looking to build its market share. Right now, there is an opportunity to gain some authority and brand visibility on the platform.
Keep All Posts in Line with Your Brand
The perceived value of your product or service aligns with your advertising and social media posts' perceived professionalism. If you post sloppy, poorly designed images and graphics, they could damage your brand and reputation. Moneypenny do a great job of creating social media posts that look great and are branded consistently.
It can help to check out a website like UpWork or PeoplePerHour and consider outsourcing some of the graphic design duties. If the budget is tight, you can also use graphic design apps such as Canva to create professional-looking social media images.
Be Entertaining and Informative
People do not follow social media accounts to be sold to constantly. Like someone who is good company or fun to go on a date with, social media accounts should be informative, entertaining, and not full of themselves!
The Huel Facebook account does an excellent job of having a personality’ and interacting with comments. Interacting in a meaningful way is an excellent method for building social engagement and brand identity.
Give Value & Build Authority
Tying into the above point about being informative, you want to build authority by helping people out. This can seem counter-intuitive sometimes. For example, if you sell PCs and repair PCs, you could create a really helpful video about building your first PC.
Creating a video that shows people how to do it themselves may seem like a strange thing to do – you are teaching people what you are selling. However, this works for several reasons. Firstly, if people don’t use your video, they will find the information they are looking for elsewhere. Secondly, whenever they inevitably encounter issues or want to do something more complicated, they will think about hiring you to help out.
Many famous digital marketers have used this approach – giving value, building authority, and then selling their services. For example, Neil Patel has hundreds of really informative videos, articles, and social media posts about digital marketing. At the same time, he (subtly) sells his tools, courses, and consultancy business.
YouTube channels such as SurfSide PPC do the same thing. They create great step-by-step tutorials and sell their services very subtly at the same time. This type of high-quality content can be repurposed from a blog post, into a video, into a social media post.
For example, you could create a detailed step-by-step video on creating a Facebook ads campaign and uploading it to YouTube. You could edit the footage into GIFs and small clips that you could use on Instagram. Finally, you could embed the video, a transcript, with several GIFs and a corresponding article, into a blog post. High-quality content is the best way to earn backlinks to your website to help build a presence of Google’s search engine results pages. Informative and entertaining content, formatted correctly for each specific platform, is the best way to build a loyal social media following.
Do Not Post Lots of Links
Social media websites make money from people staying on their websites and apps. They do not want to send people from their platform to another website. People can not click on their ads if they are not on their site.
For this reason, social media sites will tend to significantly reduce the reach of a post if it contains a link to an external website.
What you post should be specific to the social media platform, but quotes, memes, GIFs, and short videos tend to perform well on most sites. Micro-blogging, asking questions, and providing valuable information and insights can also help build a loyal audience.
Bayesian Bodybuilding does a great job of summarising recent studies on Instagram.
Upload Videos Directly
Social media websites want to be content platforms in their own right. If you link out to YouTube in a Linkedin post, the post will not be seen by many people. Conversely, if you upload a video directly to Linkedin, the initial reach will be a lot greater.
As this is the case, always upload videos and any other media directly to the social media platform. If you upload a video straight onto Linkedin, the video will likely be seen by many more people than if you paste in a YouTube link.
Respond to Comments
For people to come back to your accounts and visit your website, you should try to make them feel like a valued part of the community. Engage with people, respond to them and make them feel important and valued.
When you make people feel good – welcomed and appreciated, they will want to come back. They are also likely to share your content and give valuable feedback.
Repurpose & Post Micro-Content
The best way to find and create content specifically for a social media audience is to slice and edit your long-form, informative blog posts, and videos into micro-content. Sound bytes, GIFs, short videos, quotes, and memes all tend to perform well on social media.
Instead of just posting a link to your blog post, be imaginative and think of images and specific social-media friendly content that could be useful to your audience. Quotes from famous, authoritative people, repurposed as images tend to do well. For example, if you create a post about reading or studying, perhaps you could find a relevant quote from Socrates, Shakespeare, or Stephen Hawking.
Encourage Customers to Engage
Ask customers to use a specific hashtag, send you images with your product, and interact with your social media channels. This can help you to produce content for your channels without having to do much work. This is often referred to as User-Generated-Content or UGC.
Check Out Your Competitors
Check out your competition, see what they are doing but be unique. Make sure that your unique selling point or propositions are also in the mind of your social media fans. Display your uniqueness in your posts, images, and videos.
A great way to find a unique angle is to look at your competitors' reviews on Trustpilot, Google, Amazon, and social media. See what people’s feedback is and look into whether or not you can create a better product or service, that addresses the feedback you have found.
Conclusion
Social media can be very overwhelming. There is so much that you can potentially do to promote your business, that it is tempting not to attempt anything or to just do the bare minimum. If funds allow it, it can often be a good idea to outsource some of the leg work, such as responding to comments and interacting with specific hashtag-based-conversations, to a virtual assistant based overseas.
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