It doesn’t even have to be stated—social media is the new marketing landscape. If you have a business and you don’t have a social media presence, you are setting yourself up for certain failure.
The new generation of consumers, such as Millennials, are much more likely to check out business social media profiles and websites before they decide to make a large purchase.
This simply means: if they can’t find information about your online, they probably won’t buy from you.
That’s why today we’ll look at some tried and true ways for you to increase your social media presence.
You must engage
Social media is not like other marketing, where you just send out a message and hope people come to your store. It is in fact a dialogue, not a monologue. You will be able to directly talk with your customers and you can do it in real time.
Why most small businesses fail at social media is that they don’t engage with their customers. They just blast out marketing messages and hope someone will pay attention.
Engagement is particularly important to show that you and your brand really care about the customers.
By engaging with your current or future customers, you are showing that your brand is concerned about their well-being, and therefore you can increase brand loyalty.
Find content that works
As I mentioned, social media marketing is different from other types. In other types of marketing, you can use cheesy stock pictures to sell your products.
But that generally falls flat on social media. They want reality, some sort of reality.
They don’t want you extolling the virtues of your products or services (they can do that themselves). They want you to provide them with valuable content.
The most valuable these days is visual content. However, if you’re not too comfortable with that, you can also post informative articles and blogs posts that provide quality to your followers.
Be consistent in your posting
This is one issue that usually trips up small businesses. You should have a consistent appearance on your social media, as well as in all aspects of your business.
One thing that is difficult for small businesses is posting inconsistency. This is when small businesses have lots of passion and excitement the first few days or weeks of opening up their profile pages.
They go crazy, posting valuable content 5 or 10 times a day.
However, that cannot possibly last (while they’re busy still operating their businesses) so they soon burn out. They are tired and dejected when they don’t get the type of response that they were expecting.
So they take a break. Then, about 20 days later, they burn again, posting like crazy. This type of behavior can seem quite erratic and unprofessional to a customer. Consistency equals dependability, and if you fail in one you’ll probably fail in another (or so it seems to them).
To get you set, create a social media calendar, and space out your posts so that you can keep it up for a long time, not just a week.
The best social media advice for small businesses
These tried and true tips will keep your presence strong on social media. You may not see great results in the first two weeks or months of your social media page, but this will work in the long run.
