You Are Social | Go Where Your Customers Are
Quick Guide To Social Media Use for Businesses
Everyone is on social media! Ok, maybe not everyone, but a ton of your customers are. And, as a company, you want to be where your customers are! With social media, Google is not the only place where customers are learning about your business. They are seeing your business from posts shared by your friends, content they share, pictures they take, recommendations they are seeking, and sometimes even searching for companies on social media.
Being on social media gives you two powerful things — presence and platform.
Presence
Your company gets the ability to exist. Immediately giving your business credibility. How? By having a fully filled-out Facebook page. That means, all the details about your business are listed — location, hours, what you do, what you sell, who you are and plenty of posts.
Platform
Your company gets the opportunity to communicate with current, past and future customers. Creating and influencing the discussion, sharing important news about your business and benefits people may want to take advantage of.
Now that we have put forward the reasons and value of being on social, we need to dig into the best practices.
Best Practices
Let us start by assuming your business has a Facebook page and it is fully filled out (to the best of your abilities). If you do not, and need some guidance on how to, let us know in the comments and we can write a post about that. Going to break this down into the following categories: Building a Following, Creating Posts and When, Customer Service, and Generating New Business.
Building a Following
This could be the hardest or easiest part of this journey. You may have already mastered this part. Although, there are always little things you could be doing to add to your following. So, skip ahead if you have this down already.
1. Creating Quality Content
Perhaps a no-brainer but cannot keep saying this enough. Quality content lives forever. Rule of thumb we use for any business, when creating quality content, is to start by answering your most asked question. By doing this, you are killing a few birds with one stone. Becoming a thought leader or authority, not hiding trade secrets and your content is becoming your FAQ section.
With any content, the most important parts are to ensure the content is incredibly detailed, well thought out and addresses all next level questions related to the question. When writing or putting together the content, try to make it as timeless as possible.
Once completed, share it on all your social media channels and keep sharing it (weekly / monthly / whenever it is timely). And now that you have produced that awesome piece of content, you can re-package it into different mediums. For instance, you could make it into a video (for YouTube) or a meme (for Instagram), post it on Reddit, etc.
2. Commenting on other posts or answering questions people have about your specialization.
To do this best, you need to have a social media listener turned on and configure for the hashtags, or keywords you want to see posts on. You can do this manually or use a tool like Hootsuite, Klout or Buzzsumo.
With this method, the most important thing is to add quality and well thought out content into the conversation. If your point, on the subject, is contrarian, unique or controversial you definitely need to add it in! Make sure you explain why you think or believe or know it to be true. Or if you can help someone, help that person. If your content makes sense to add into the conversation, then give a synopsis and send people to it.
The point of doing this is to add to your authority, help people, push your content, and further the conversation in your field or specialization.
Best platforms for this method are Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Reddit and YouTube.
3. Ask Your Current Customers to Like Your Page(s)
Probably redundant but need to throw it in.
Only applicable if social is where you want to grow and communicate with current, past and future customers. At any opportunity you need to be asking them to ‘like’ your page or visit your page or check for updates. Use any and all opportunities to get them back to your page — on your receipts, in your stores, in your emails, and when you are talking one-on-one with your customers. Enticing or incenting them to like your page is key. So, offer something of value in return for a like. Maybe, a discount or something for free like a piece of swag.
4. Creating a Contest or a Giveaway
One big rule for this is to NOT offer something from your business (product or service). It changes the contest or giveaway into a self-promotion.
Best practices: It should be timely, tied to another big event (like Christmas or Halloween), be something everyone (in your customer demo) wants but is unwilling to buy for themselves and something viral that people will share with their friends. The whole point if this method is to get people sharing with their friends. If you do not have any followers yet you can boost your contest or giveaway post. When you set it up, make sure you have a clearly defined person you want to target and use Facebook’s targeting to reach those persons.
5. Advertising
If we consider time = money and money = time, then this should factor into your cost / benefit analysis on social media management.
Assuming you built your audience with quality content, been helpful, got your current customers to ‘like’ your page, and are running contests/promotions. Now, you are looking for scale. Advertising is the place to go.
OR
Assuming you do not have an audience but have created the content, been helpful, asked current customers to ‘like’ page and created the promos/contests. Now, you need the audience advertising is for your business.
How to get started?
Well…you want to make sure you are taking your best posts (your quality content) and boosting them. You do not need to spend a lot of money on it. Maybe $100 or less. The hope would be to get a ton more likes and visits to your content. With ‘likes’ and clicks to your content you have a created an audience (which we will get into in another post). The audience is interested in [the topic you specialize in] and can be called upon at any time to advertise your business to.
Now, if you start by boosting your contest or giveaway then you will be doing the same — creating an audience.
If your sales funnel is quite long, then you can start sending the audience interested in the content / contest / giveaway more content around the problem your business solves. Then eventually giving them your offer.
In this case, advertising provides a shortcut for you to hit your goals. If you are short on time and long on money, this is a good way to go. If you are short on money and long on time, then commit daily to the organic building process through quality content, answering questions, being helpful, etc. Note, you need dedication, and discipline to execute the organic strategy. We advocate for both organic and advertising.
Creating Posts or Communicating with your Followers
Again, we are trying to provide value. What is value in this case? Well, it could be reminders, content about questions your customers are having, promotions your business are having, inside looks into your business, polls, diy or instructional videos, important simplified news related to your business /industry, gratitude posts, customer feedback (good and bad), etc. The posts need to be relevant and not spammy.
The communication needs to be clear and concise (no wasted words). Your content mix should be a combination of everything we listed above.
#Hashtags in Your Posts?
We say yes! As long as they are relevant to the content. They can really help broaden your reach on Instagram and Twitter but not always on Facebook or other platforms.
One tip don’t over use them in your posts.
Using Social Media as Customer Service
Every problem is an opportunity! With any problem, you can either WOW your customer or you can leave your customer with a bad taste in their mouth.
Now, a lot of people are either writing negative or positive posts on your page or posting them on their own. Responding to both, we believe, is important. With the positive posts, your company gets the opportunity to be grateful, humble and renew your commitment to building a better product or service. On the negative posts, you get the opportunity to turn a customer from foe to friend. On top of that, you get to be humble, appreciative and renew your promise and mission to any/all customers past, present and future. Again, these are opportunities not to squander. Most importantly, you want to respond quickly plus make sure you leave the angry customers happy and happy customers happier.
Generating New Business on Social Media
It seems like this whole post is about generating new business, doesn’t it? Let’s add in some extra points on this topic:
1. You can always offer your product or service to people in posts or comments on posts. Again, this needs to address the problem they are having. Whether it be functionality, style, price, availability, need, shipping, etc. Providing a solution to a problem is key to this scenario working! Don’t be pushy. Soft selling works best.
2. Asking friends or followers to promote your product or service. This is best for timely events and promotions like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, tax season or a long weekend. Make sure your promotion is impossible for people not to share.
3. Advertising your products or services. This should be a post on its own, but let us add a couple drops of knowledge.
Know what feeling you want to sell and/or the problem you are solving, know who you are selling to and give those people an offer they cannot refuse. Then, continuously advertise to the people interested in your product or service with retargeting campaigns. Sounds simple, right? A lot more to unpack for another post.
To recap, to win on social media you need to be dedicated, disciplined and in tune with your customers wants and needs. Benefits of being social can be hard to fully understand and display. But we will say this…any customer centric company or brand needs to be where their customers are!
Happy Marketing
-Michael
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