How to Build Your Social Media Presence for Your Business (Step-by-Step Guide)
Find out the 7 steps you should take to optimise your social media pages for your business.
Congratulations, you have just established your very own business! You have all the operations and logistics set up and is all ready to receive the customers! The only problem you face now is that no one know that you are open for business.
With brick and mortar businesses, you can count on the pedestrian traffic to realise that you are open for business. That, however, is unfortunately not the case for online businesses and freelancers working in their studios or home office.
Step 1: Determine your objective and audience.
It goes without saying that different social media channels call for different types of content — while Twitter is optimised for short messages, Instagram is optimised for visual contents. You know that, so stop recycling the same content across all of the social media platforms. People are not on Twitter to see links directing them to Facebook or Instagram.
If you’re targetting everyone, you are targetting no one.
This is the Number 1 rule that all marketers stick to and it makes perfect sense. To put it simply, you don’t expect males to buy sanitary pads from you, so you should direct your efforts to push content females users will like instead of trying to include the males. Determine who are the people who are most likely to convert and target them on social media platforms.
Step 2: Establish your social media voice.
Determine what kind of tone you want to use in your copy-writings and keep them consistent. This will help your followers form a strong image of the brand and create loyal social media followers.
One way you can do this is to have an in-house marketing department instead of outsourcing to agencies so that you can ensure that there will be a same consistent voice on the platforms.
Show them the human behind the account.
Putting a human touch to your social media accounts doesn’t rob away the professionalism of the company. In fact, companies are known to be criticised for coming off like robots on social media platforms.
Social media platforms are now commonly used as customer service platforms and customers are expecting prompt replies to their queries on the social media sites. The level of customer service that are expected in brick and mortar stores should be provided on your social media platforms as well.
Step 2: Plan your posting schedule.
It is important to keep your social media pages active by regularly generating content. A simple search on Google will show that most social media accounts require daily updates to stay relevant and let your followers feel your social media presence. Check out how often you should post on each social media platforms here.
An editorial calendar will be greatly useful to you with this because it helps to guide your content generation timeline and keeps you organised while managing multiple social media platforms. It will also help you to take note of the various festival and events happening throughout the year.
You can have your editorial calendar on a Google Spreadsheet or a Google Calendar, whichever works better for you! I work better with the spreadsheet because I want to have the details of what I am going to post but Google Calendar will be good for those who want a good overall view of their posting schedule and receive reminders for them.
Step 3: Automate your postings.
Now that you have planned out your posting schedule, execution comes next. Content should be released at the time where your target audience are most active. However, they are often active during after-work hours and you do not want to be in the situation where you have to excuse yourself from social events to tweet or upload a video for your work.
Using online tools like Buffer.com or Later.com will help make your life easier because you can load your content online in advance and let them do the postings for you at your preferred time.
Step 4: Produce content that are in demand.
People go on social media platforms to be entertained, not to be a recipient of corporates’ hard-sell antics. Make your content stand out from the millions of content generated every hour by producing original content that are relevant to your business.
The content can be indirectly related to your brand. For instance, Verlocal Singapore produces an ongoing weekly 3-parts series which features one of their hosts each week. They do so because they are a booking platform that connects local freelancers and small businesses to the masses and this series will help to bring more publicity and awareness to the local freelancers’ community.
Another way to generate unique content is to keep up with current affairs. Anything under the sun can be used to generate content — from Fathers’ Day and Dragon Boat Festival to FIFA World Cup and latest food trends like zang zang bao (dirty buns).
If you are unsure of what to post, always go for visuals because posts with images generate more engagements than posts without them. 2 out of 5 users expressed more favourable responses to visual contents rather than wordy posts. Of course, the visuals must be aesthetic as well, especially on visuals-optimised social media sites such as Instagram.
Check out How to Take Good Product Photos for E-Commerce Business to figure out how to take good images of what you are selling.
Step 5: Maximise outreach.
Maximise your social media outreach by directing more traffic to your social media sites. Maintain multiple streams of traffic to your social media sites and you will soon see growth in your social media presence.
Hashtags are very important and useful but do not use irrelevant hashtags! Companies have reported to see 43% increase in likes with posts that have hashtags relevant to the post. The people who are looking into those hashtags are more likely to be interested in the hashtag and hence interested in what your brand can offer.
It is pertinent to direct your existing customers to your social media sites as well because this will help you to engage with them more and convert them to returning customers. You can do so by sharing your social media sites with them through your email and website. Put those social media icons there and they will be clicking the links to find out more about you!
Traffic to your social media sites does not have to be organic. In fact, paid advertisements on social media sites does wonders to bring more awareness to your brand. You can use the advertisements to optimise content for your users through a split test. If you are confident that your content is optimised, you can also run ad campaigns to convert more social media users to customers. The possibilities are endless!
Step 6: Engage in time.
As mentioned previously, customers are expecting customer service from your social media sites. Prompt replies is the most fundamental — and often overlooked — aspect of customer service. Reply their queries within a few hours and let them know that you care about their concerns and wants to help them.
According to Rebecca Coleman, 71% of users who received a quick and effective response on social media are more likely to recommend the brand to others.
This is particularly important for negative responses on social media. According to Jay Baer’s research, answering a complaint increases customer advocacy by as much as 25% while failure to answer a complaint decreases customer advocacy by as much as 50%.
Step 7: Review and revise.
This is probably the most important step because this determines whether you can achieve long-term growth in your social media presence. Make use of the social media analytics to help you optimise content for your identified audience and figure out when your audience are most active online. Do not be afraid to make drastic changes to your posting schedule if that will help with building a stronger social media presence for your brand.
