It is often a struggle for a small business to find the money for advertising. A great place to start promoting your business inexpensively is through different social media websites, which are often free and can garner great leads when used in a strategic way.
While the popularity of social media sites often originated on personal levels, many businesses have seen the benefits of them and have incorporated social media into their marketing plans. Here are some basic social media marketing tips for your small business.
The first step to taking advantage of social media is to develop a strategy. There are many different networks to get involved with, so determine which ones are best for you and your company – whether it’s the ease of up-to-the-minute information-sharing provided by Twitter, the opportunity to interact with your customers on Facebook, the location-based interaction of Foursquare, or the photo-sharing capabilities of Pinterest. Choose which sites are best for you, and establish professional accounts associated with your business. Of course, review the terms and conditions of the sites carefully, and check that you are following proper procedures.
Once you have a profile set up, explore the functionality of the website. You want to learn how to use it and what it does before you start interacting with customers. After you’ve developed a good grasp of how to manage the site, start connecting with customers. Start with those with whom you have an established relationship already, and once you start being an interesting and active presence on the site, your followers and customers will only grow!
There are a few key things to keep in mind, however. One of the most important is to avoid spamming your followers. Frequent updates are a good thing in social media, but make sure they are relevant and necessary updates. If your activity on the site becomes annoying or tedious, you will lose followers quickly.
As you do start to interact with more fellow users, don’t forget to respond quickly. Social media is all about lightening-quick interactions, and if a potential or established customer is reaching out to you, they expect a quick response, and you don’t want to let them down.
Let’s look at a social media example of my company, TradeStable.com.ng, a free classifieds website with a webpage on Facebook. Take a look at the number of followers it has, the number of posts and how they are arranged on the page, and the use of humor to make the numerous Wall posts seem lighter for the followers.
The main page on Facebook is composed by the logo image (on the left), plus a collage with pictures of online products as a cover photo. It has more than 33,000 followers, which makes the page pretty successful and shows off a good business with satisfied customers.
It’s also important to notice the fact that we don’t only talk about our products and services; we also have posts about environmental issues and up-to-date news, so our followers don’t perceive it as a spamming website which they should disengage from.
Social media is a powerful tool, and if used correctly, it can be an incredible free resource to help your business grow. So, remember to choose the right social media page(s), make your profile stand out by using images and your logo to make it more attractive; and make sure the content of your page is assorted, including your products and/or services, plus some other humorous or hot news so your followers will visit your page frequently and suggest it to their friends. Social media has one rule of thumb for businesses: you reap what you sow. The more time and effort you put on your social media page, the more followers you’ll have, and the more successful your business is bound to be.
One of the reasons social media has been so successful for both large and small enterprises is that the consumer has the rare opportunity to see the human face of the business. Interacting via Twitter and Facebook is far less formal which gives you an opportunity to talk to your customers in a more genuine way, and also share interesting information and give advice about what you do.
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