Which social media platforms are best for your business?

Social media marketing should well and truly be a permanent component of your overall advertising strategy by now. The problem is that leveraging social media for your business is not the same as using social media to keep in contact with your friends and family.

Here are 6 steps that will help you decide which social media platforms are best for your business and how to manage your new network.

1. Know your audience: Research the demographics of your audience and understand their problems and concerns. What are their ‘pain points’ and how can your business address these problem areas? Once you understand your customers, then you can craft at least three marketing messages that you want to communicate to your audience.
2. What platforms do they frequent? Social media marketing is time consuming so you want to make the best use of your time. This means that you must utilise the platforms that your audience frequents. A particular age group or gender might use entirely different platforms, so you may need to target specific messages to different categories of customers on different platforms.
3. Know your goals: You want to generate leads and increase conversions, so to achieve these goals you need to push traffic from the social media platforms to your website. You also need to add social sharing buttons to your blog or product pages on your website, to encourage sharing of your content, which will result in more traffic to your website.
4. Start small: Once you have identified the platforms used by your audience, select just one or two and start slowly. Maybe spend 30 minutes a day crafting your messages, giving helpful tips and sharing your content across these channels. You can increase this time and number of platforms as you see fit and you can also use social media management software to help you organise your network.
5. Communicate with your audience: For a successful social media network you need two-way communication. So respond to comments, mentions/tags and questions, share other people’s content as well, and respond to complaints (don’t just delete them!). You want to build a positive relationship with your audience that is transparent and engaging. This increase the awareness of your brand and ultimately, conversions and sales.
6. Paid advertising: This traffic booster has now entered the realms of social media, so consider paid advertisements on your social platforms. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all now offer opportunities for paid advertising and used strategically, can readily boost traffic and conversions.

Once you have set up your networks, you need to keep posting and sharing with your target audience. For more information on social media marketing, call us on (07) 3333 2932 or request a free quote online.