Reflection #2: 6 Tips for Businesses to Best use Social Media

6 Tips for Businesses to Best use Social Media

1.      Know Your Audience

This may seem obvious, but it’s important to know who your customers are. Having an understanding of who you are catering your product toward will influence how you represent your brand on social media. This includes the type of content you post, the frequency of your posts, how you interact with your customers, and even the platform used to reach your customers.

2.      Choosing/Understanding a Platform

Knowing what social media to use is crucial for the success of your business. There are many different social media sites to choose from, and no two are the exact same. Some social media sites benefit more from the use of eye-catching visuals, while others benefit from intelligent or witty text based messages. Understanding which social media sites your customers use and how they use them is essential in determining the platforms(s) you use. As Andreas Kaplan puts it, “choosing the right medium for any given purpose depends on the target group to be reached and the message to be communicated.” Different social media sites attract certain groups of people and messages are conveyed in unique ways based on the platform of choice.

3.      Have a Team Specifically for Social Media

This is more important than you might expect. Having a single individual be responsible for a business’s social media account(s) will be overwhelming and could lead to dire consequences. Splitting the load across several professionals will lead to a healthy account with less likelihood of something offensive, incorrect, or unintentional being accidentally posted under your brand’s name. Having a team determining what gets posted will not only decrease the chances of a negative post, it should in fact raise the quality of what gets posted because each post will be seen and reviewed by several people.

4.      Be Active

Social media sites are tools used to stay connected with others, in this case your customers. You want to keep these connections strong by posting updates and interacting with users. This helps keep your customers engaged with your brand and continuously puts your brand out there for others to see. Stay active, stay relevant.

5.      Be Creative/Interesting

Make sure that what you are posting is going to catch your audience’s attention. This can be done through originality with what you post, and through tailoring your posts to fit what your audience wants to hear. They want to have conversations; you need to know what they want those conversations to be about. Post content that is valuable to your audience so that they care about your posts.

6.      Take it Easy

Lastly, don’t get too worked up about something when it goes wrong. Keeping the attention of your audience is important, but you don’t want to be overbearing or else they may get annoyed. You might still post something offensive on one of your accounts, even with a team. This could lead to some of your customers deciding not to trust you or your product anymore, but you can’t let that get to you. All you can do is own up to the mistake and strive to do better next time.

Kaplan, Andreas M., “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons (2010) 53, 59-68