Social media has become an essential part of marketing for businesses locally and around the world. Owning a business is a great accomplishment but things might not go so well if you don't have a presence online. How well do your customers know you on social media sites? Are you too personal? Do you only post things about your business and nothing about yourself? Or are you just not sure if you're doing things right because social media can a bit overwhelming? If these sound like anything you've been experiencing, then these strategies should be some help to you. I'll be reiterating ideas from “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media” written by Andreas M. Kaplan and focusing on extra steps that will help grow your audience and gain network connections from "6 Tips on Running Micro-Influencer Campaigns" written by Steve Young, an app marketing specialist and contributor to Entrepreneur. Here are six tips that will help to enhance your social media marketing skills and get you on the right track for success.
1) Picking the Right Social Media Site
There are a lot of social media sites out there on the interwebs to choose from to make your presence known online. However, you have to make sure that you're getting your message across clearly and concisely about your business. If you like to keep things short, sweet and to the point and can express yourself in 140 characters with no problems, then Twitter could be the one for you. Maybe you rather post pictures of your products, edit them with cool filters, write long descriptions, and put fun hashtags; Instagram would be the way to go. Or you may want to have a page that lets you send updates and pictures to your customers and incorporate video has an interesting way to keep your customers engaged; Facebook is the "one stop shop" for things like that. Of course, you can have more than one social media account but sometimes taking one step at a time can help you and your business out in the long run.
2) Quality Over Quantity--Knowing Your Demographics
Now that you've picked the social media site that feels best for you, time for posting and sharing. Those are great ways for you to gain attraction online, but make sure that it's meaningful. If your business is all about apparel then your posts should be geared towards that. If you and your customers are going crazy over your thoughts on Kanye West's new fall collection and then you decide to post a few links about Kanye's trip to Cabo, this may be confusing to your customers and make question what is your social media page and business about. You don't want to make random posts just to have content on your page. There's nothing wrong with being interactive with your customers but you have to make sure that they stay focused on you and the business, without being a "free ad" for someone else.
3) Similar Content Across the Board
If you decided to create more than one social media account for your business, they need to have similar content across one another. The reason for this is because some of your customers might not have all those social media accounts like you do. It may seem a bit repetitive to post the same content, but you'll have to post them in completely different ways. If you posted a picture with a long statement on Facebook, you may want to edit/shorten it and include hashtags at the end if you decide to post it on Instagram. If you want to take the same picture and put it on Twitter, you may want to only use the hashtags to get your message across.
4) Bigger is Better but Small Can Work Too
Steve Young talked about how getting involved with micro-influencers can help you gain more of an audience and find network connections. He says that micro-influencers "are influencers that have less than a million followers." (Young "6 Tips on Running Micro-Influencer Campaigns" 2017). This could be beneficial for you to connect with an influencer who has followers that are interested in the same aspects as your business/brand. This is a way to implement a new strategy to grow your audience and gain more attraction than you thought would be possible. Young explains that there are different things to consider when trying to connect/collaborate with micro-influencers
-Connect with an influencer that is similar to your business (ex: plus size clothing business, find plus size influencers to review your clothing).
-Know their engagement level. If they have 10,000 followers it may be a lot easier for that influencer to engage with their followers compared to someone who has 250,000 followers.
-Find other influencers. You may not want to just stay in that pool of 10,000 followers, if you want to expand your audience then there's nothing wrong with finding other influencers that are similar to the first one you connected with. The more the merrier.
-Update periodically. You should always update your customers on the next few things that you have planned for your business/brand, influencers are the same way. Send them updates periodically but not to the point where it seems like your badgering them with so many different things going on in your business.
-Where's the love? Always, always, always show appreciation to your customers and influencers. With influencers, you can respect and show love to them for giving reviews on your products and let them know that they are your aspirations for creating a better business/brand.
5) Change Isn't Scary
Since social media sites and apps grow and expand connections every day, you should also decide to grow and go with the current. Keeping a static social media strategy is definitely not the way to go. What works for a few months might not work for two years, this means you need to adapt to change and update your strategies every so often to make sure that everything is working efficiently to get your business and brand across.
6) "Express" Yourself
Andreas Kaplan talked about the five "Be's" which are
-Be active
-Be interesting
-Be humble
-Be unprofessional
-Be honest
You should always put your best foot forward when making posts on your business's social media accounts but that's not to say you can't have a little fun in letting your customers get to know the real you. You wouldn't want to create posts about your weird habits and strange obsessions, leave that for your personal accounts, but you could create posts that will invite your customers to have discussions with you. Maybe you're a makeup artist talking about the latest trends on mermaid makeup palettes or you're a huge sneakers connoisseur and want to fangirl over Adidas's new design for their shoes. You can be about your business without being all about your business.
It may seem like a lot of work to do, but if you implement a lot of these steps into your daily social media marketing strategies, your business will gain a whole new level of success.
Works Cited
Kaplan, Andreas M., “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons (2010) 53, 59-68 (PDF)
"What Social Media Are You?" Playbuzz. N.p., 31 May 2016. Web. 27 Feb. 2017.
Young, Steve. "6 Tips on Running Micro-Influencer Campaigns." Entrepreneur. Entrepreneur Media, Inc., 26 Feb. 2017. Web. 27 Feb. 2017.
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