Social Media for Business – How to Maximize your Social Media Presence
Social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, have become a huge hit for business owners over the past couple of years because of their huge marketing potential. The fact that you expose your business to millions of people all over the world is nothing short of tempting. If you rake in a fraction of that, you’d still be raking in hundreds or thousands of people to your business, which is more than enough to increase your profit and build your brand effectively.
But is it enough to create a social media account and wait for it to work its wonders? You’d have to do a lot of work and tweaking in order to really maximize social media. How does one effectively make use of these social media sites?
For the sake of this tutorial, let us pretend that you are the proud owner of a dog grooming business.
1.) Keep it updated – Whether you’re limited to Twitter’s 140 character limit or Facebook’s status content, you need to keep your social media updated with fresh content. In this case you can post a link to an article about dog grooming or your own article with a link to your website or business’ contact info. Your customers will appreciate the fact that you are updating your page and they can expect fresh content. This also gives them an idea that you can address their concerns through your social media accounts because of the frequency of your activity.
2.) Post relevant content – In line with #1, update your page or account with relevant content. It doesn’t have to be a long-winded post about the perks of grooming, but it can be a video or picture on topics relevant to your business. For example, I can post a video about DIY dog grooming. People are looking for information online, and one of the most effective ways to build brand is to develop your authority.
3.) Offer incentives to frequent or share your content – Social media sites have different features which allow people to share other people’s content. If you want to build your brand effectively, offer incentives to people who’ll share your content. For example, you can create a contest on Facebook which will allow people to post their photos of their pets on your page and share it to their friends. The photos with the most number of LIKES will be the winner. This is just one of many promotional contests that you can do in social media sites. If you can get 100 people to participate in your content, that’s 100 people who’ll share your social media page and their content. It’s a WIN-WIN situation for you and your customer.
Doing these won’t take up most of your time. Try to set aside 2 to 3 hours of your time to manage your business’ social media accounts, and see how far it can take you.