Small Business & Social Media
Social media has become a large driver of how businesses can attract, engage, and convert their consumers. It can also be very overwhelming on what channels and tactics are most efficient in delivering great results.
As a small business, how can your company effectively use the proper social media channels to leverage your offerings to your audience? Are the popular channels the best for your company and industry?
Over 70 percent of the population is on some form of social media and this offers an advantage of cheaper and effective strategies to reach a large(r) number of consumers.
With over 2 billion people on Facebook and 1.6 billion connected to a small business on Facebook, this is the biggest social media channel on the planet and should be utilized by your business regardless of industry. Completing your business page, will not only give you substance as a company, but will allow for greater interaction. Taking advantage of well-crafted posts, photo uploads, and stories about company or product updates, event announcements, and even random fun, will generate engagement and excitement for your company.
By having a Facebook business page, you then have access to advertising tools and analytics, which will help you build your digital marketing strategy. Ads have become an essential part to all user’s daily feeds and in how we learn more about businesses. Facebook ads do not have to cost very much and the creative doesn’t have to be extensive, as limitations are set on copy and design. Facebook Ads will help increase conversion rates of specific actions including: app installs, website conversions, video views, shop orders, etc.
Organic posts that have been posted directly to your business’ page, you have the ability to ‘boost’ those posts that you deem important to a campaign or company update. A ‘boost’ can be accomplished by targeting those who like your page and their friends or by a specific list. Boosts will help your company increase more engagement centric activities like page likes, comments, shares, and brand awareness.
What needs to be considered is your audience – who will you be advertising to? Are there specific traits or demographics you wanted targeted? Or are you retargeting an audience? The ability to test different segments to understand who your audience is and what they like to see will allow for your strategy to evolve.
Owned by Facebook and is the visual storytelling social media channel. All posts come with an image or video to convey the message versus just text. The channel is used via mobile users, which are mainly in the millennial generation and makes them highly engaged.
With how visual Instagram is, the best type of companies do advertise and participate on Instagram are those that offer visual products (clothes and accessories, food and drink, furniture, etc.), service-based businesses (restaurants, landscaping, marketing agencies), and tech companies (that specifically sell hardware).
Similar to Facebook, not only is running an ad cost effective, there are specific design and content restrictions on advertisements that will help guide your creative development. Finalizing the data choices will be the time consuming aspect.
Instagram’s intense inclusion of the hashtag, which helps guide what topics are ‘trending’, is a tactic that your company can incorporate in to the posts and ads your company will run. Utilizing a hashtag, will increase awareness and attract customers to your pages.
While it is not the best site to use to attract customers, it is the best website to attract the best talent for your company. This professional networking community allows for your company to post jobs and information about the company culture. There is also the opportunity that if a user is following your company, your company can share business-related updates without being “too promotional”.
Being part of specific industry related LinkedIn Groups will provide you with new ideas and answer other’s questions, as well. By being an active member on LinkedIn, it will increase your brand awareness from others in the industry, showcase your expertise, and drive online traffic to your company’s website.
LinkedIn can become great to conduct business if you are a B2B company with specific messaging and audience targeting of product and company information shared to followers of companies who use your goods or services.
This bird is the most controversial social channel out of the ‘big 5’. With an expanded character limit, of 280, companies are allowed a little extra freedom in what they post.
This channel should be considered carefully on if it’s the best use for your company. How often do new and exciting events happen at the company? Are you known for humor? How widely known is your company and the products and services you offer? As of September 5, 2019, just over 5,787 tweets are put out per second – that’s a lot of chirping! How can your company fly through all of the clutter?
Multiple tweets per day will help boost organic awareness and engagement, but utilizing Twitter paid ads will help gain traction where need.
YouTube
When considering using YouTube as potential social media channel for your company, it’s important to analyze the main uses of YouTube versus what your company wants to use the channel for. Do you offer tutorials on your products? Interviews with influential people within the industry? Use promotional videos as a consistent marketing strategy? These are just some questions to consider on if this platform is where resources should be allocated.
Now, YouTube does have the benefit of being owned by Google, so access to Google’s advertising, is available and can help rankings by the use of Google AdWords and analytics.
There are additional social media channels that can be important to your strategies, such as, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok. TikTok and Snapchat are channels that have a short shelf life in terms of audience attention and capabilities of getting a message across. A major consideration for these channels should be how fast-paced does your company move and is it “exciting” enough to grab the attention of the users? Pinterest is very lifestyle and creative oriented with a heavy majority user demographic of female. Very specific content, industries, and companies will be more likely to succeed on this channel.
Keep in mind that within all social media channels that your company chooses to participate on, being cognizant of your keywords and tags that are associated with your posts and ads, will only help increase awareness and conversion on the specific action you wish your audience to complete.
At Colleen Eakins Design, we will consult with your company on your social media strategy to determine the best creative resources to execute cohesive and visual engaging promotional materials.
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