Social Media Tips for Businesses

Social media is a fantastic way for your brand or business to:

• Increase brand awareness

• Showcase your products and services

• Offer tailored and prompt customer service

• Increase web traffic

• Grow your audience – new and old

• Make sales and generate leads

Here are some simple tips to implement:

You need a strategy.

It isn’t as scary as it sounds!

You are simply planning out what your objective is by using social media as a marketing tool and what are the goals you want to achieve.

By identifying this you can select the best social media platforms to utilise and with a clear journey in your mind, you are more likely to achieve the goals you set.

Where is your audience? Who are your audience?

Research your key demographic.

This will help tailor your content as well as show you which platforms are going to work for you. One of the biggest myths of social media is that you need to be on every platform and straight away, which is not true. It is better to pick the most appropriate platform and post consistently than picking the wrong platform and having too many to manage!

An optimised and effective website / landing page

Ensuring you have a fully up to date, fully working and optimised website for your followers to land on is important.

Your website is your shop window and it needs to not only mirror your social media presence but instil trust.

Speaking of shop windows, Facebook and Instagram have shop facilities so you can put individual products as well as collections on social media. You can tag the products in posts and it makes it really easy for consumers to shop via social media. It is also applicable for services as well as products.

Good content plan

80/20 is a great basis.

What you should post should be interesting or useful. Keep sales tactics to a minimum as constant sales pushing is a real turn off for your audience.

This doesn’t mean don’t talk about your product or service. Showcase your products and services with engaging video, imagery and insight. Content can also be an eclectic mixture of getting involved with awareness days and national holidays to market trends and applicable insight. The sky is the limit. You can also get creative with social media ad design, to provide engaging content in an ad format.

Competitions

RT & Follow, Like & Comment and caption competitions are really good ways to increase followers, engagement and brand awareness.

If you are a product based business this is really easy to do and if you’re a service based business it might work well, depends on your service. For example, if you are a beautician you could gift a treatment but if you’re an accountant or a builder it’s not so easy. That’s why finding a product to prize that is associated with your company or an awareness day is useful.

Beware, there will be a drop off in new gained followers post-competition but if you have planned properly and done your research, this will be minimal.

Go live. Or video.

Social media loves live video and video in general. The social media algorithms will rate this type of content higher as it not only more engaging but it is content that is solely housed on their platform rather than a link off their site.

Going ‘live’ is intimidating but this is a great opportunity to showcase your personality and everyone understands that live video is not meant to be perfect. However, if you decide to record in advance this is still an engaging piece of content.

Call to actions.

Make sure that your content has a purpose and hence, a call to action. Is it to - Read More? Visit your site? Share?

If it is a web link, make it trackable so you can see how many people click through.

Network. Social Listen.

Social listening is the process of monitoring your brand’s social media channels for conversations and mentions of your brand regarding specific keywords, topics, phrases, competitors and industries.

This will help identify influencers and communities to engage with, help you conduct customer service, monitor competitors, be at the helm of emerging trends, etc.

Also, by monitoring sentiment you will able to tweak your content and strategy going forwards.

Read: What is Social Listening & Why Should I care?

Got more questions?

We are always up for talking about ways to boost your social media strategy, content and results so feel free to drop our PR & Social Media Manager an email: wendy.ford@dupreeinternational.com