Kickstart your social media pages to energise your business

Yahoo, Google, YouTube and Facebook hold prime positions in the public’s conscious making them incredibly important tools. For small businesses, social media platforms are a huge aspect of communication with customers.

So if you don’t use social media, or aren’t truly engaged there are five enormous reasons you should be engaging:

• Cost effective marketing
• Sincere
• Additional method of communication
• Demonstrate the business’s unique selling point
• Engagement helps search engine optimisation (SEO)

How to use social media platforms

Start with a plan. Look at the platforms available and who engages with them, does this fit with the audience potentially to gain from existing customers? It may be a surprise how many will immediately support a digital presence and that support immediately will extend reach to the people connected to them who perhaps have not heard of the business before.

Keep it sincere!

This is not the space for simple adverts to dominate, story telling the business is far more effective for engagement which will increase the reach. Boring adverts will not get picked up by the algorithm, each platform must fight it out with the others as to who has the most engaging content, they won’t allow boring posts to ruin their own engagement.

So no adverts? Not necessarily, targeted adverts can be cost effective and when placed correctly can be an excellent method of attracting new users. It can also be switched on or off painlessly. Most platforms offer free training to get the best out of your investment if you choose to use this route.

Build relationships

The story telling aspect of building the content for the page should start enjoying some engagement from the audience, setting a routine to reply to this engagement is important to keep growing the reach. It doesn’t have to be that often; regularity is more important.

Don’t be self-serving

Being humble, kind, and supportive will give a greater engagement that repeatedly trying a hard sell of a product or service. Information that is of use to your audience is more likely to retain their engagement.

Sometimes it doesn’t go your way

Respond appropriately to negative comments, it isn’t always a bad thing to receive a bad review, but it is not a good idea to leave them unanswered. If tempers are running hot, ask for help from a trusted source in the response.

SEO

The more a search engine can find about an organisation, the more easily it is found, and this pushes an organisation up the search list. Correctly filling in the business information, linking with to the website, and promoting digital presence to customers through physical items, like a logo on an in invoice or poster in a waiting room – all these things can help drive virtual traffic and create a digital presence that is easy to find.

Don’t be afraid to ask for reviews, new customers will use these to determine where to visit, and they will also help with SEO.

Still nervous?

Follow a couple of pages and track how they build content. It doesn’t have to be the same industry; authentic content has value and is an opportunity to showcase an organisation accurately. Start small and build the content whilst confidence in the platform grows.