There was a time where you could quietly ignore social media in your business, but that’s no longer the reality. Social media is a cost-effective way to reach a larger audience and advertise your services. It’s brief, informative, engaging, and builds your company’s credibility online. With great social media profiles, you can instantly look successful and knowledgeable. Without them, companies may struggle to remain relevant and prove that they’re up-to-date. A growing segment of customers choose to find businesses and products through social media. Other customers find companies on the Internet, and having good social media profiles will help your company’s website rank higher on search engines.
At its core, social media is a way of providing helpful information and content to your potential customers right at the time they’re looking for that information. If someone is looking for reviews of your restaurant, they may search Twitter and find what people are saying right now. This is why it can be so important to keep conversations going about your company and to create helpful content that your potential customers (and current customers) will find engaging.
Social media is known as a type of pull advertising, since it pulls readers into your company and website in naturally engaging ways, rather than traditional push advertising that interrupts consumers (such as during a radio ad) and pushing the message out. Other types of pull advertising include SEO (Search Engine Optimization), content marketing (which includes creating regular blog content), product placement, and corporate sponsorship.
Here are three tips to remember when starting out your social media strategy.
- Consistency is key. If you only post an update once every 6 months, you aren’t going to reap the benefits of this tool. If you’re beginning on a social media strategy for a small business, shoot for 1-2 posts a day across all relevant channels.
- Pick the right social media channels. Find out which social media channels your customers and potential customers are using. Do they use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, LinkedIn, or other channels? If you have limited time and resources, it’s more important to maintain the top two to four channels with regular posts than hit every possible social media channel sporadically.
- Don’t use social media exclusively to self-promote. If you do so, you’ll quickly lose followers. Instead, most of your posts should be sharing useful content that will help your customers. You can aim for 5% self promotion (sales, links to site, etc.) and up to 20% of your posts can be promoting content your company creates (blogs, videos, publications, white papers, or specific industry content).
Remember, even a small business can make a big impact in today’s market. The stories of starting small and going big happen all around us, and social media is a great way to get the word out about your brand or services. In addition to utilizing the benefits of social media to help your business grow, you’ll also want to establish your credibility with a prestigious office location. You can keep virtual offices in multiple locations to engage customers in local markets by renting office space from CEO SUITE. Contact us to learn about how virtual office space or serviced offices can help you catapult your business ahead of the pack.