When venturing into social media for the first time there are three things to consider
• Personnel
• Targeting the right audience
• Your website
These days we are seeing a huge growth in salaries and even departments dedicated to building exposure on various social networks. If you are a small business this doesn’t mean you miss out. In fact now you can compete more than ever.
Starting with your personnel, great social media managers are:
• Outgoing
• Socially adept
• Smart
• Passionate
• Forward thinking
But do keep in mind that just because someone doesn’t chat a lot face to face that they won’t be like that online. There are many people that struggle to string two sentences together in a conversation but can happily conduct a 2 hour conversation via Facebook or Twitter.
Once you have selected the right person you will need to choose the major networks you’d like to play with. Most people aim to have some presence on the 5 large networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. However if these don’t suit your business then simply having the page created with your contact details can be enough to claim your brand.
There are niche specific social networks that cannot be forgotten about and this might be a way to get ahead of your competitors.
Adding social icons to your website can greatly increase engagement traffic to your social pages. You may be surprised how many businesses do this wrong. Don’t hide your icons away from content you want shared. Immerse your social media buttons throughout your website content to make it easy for readers to like and share through the various social networks.
Understand the demographic using the social network and what content they like. Networks like Pinterest are all about the pictures so watermark the images with your logo, Facebook is all about the funny memes and deals, so target your content that is shareable and appeals to the users.
Be realistic and patient. Less than 1% of all items on social media go viral so don’t expect huge engagement to start off with. Social media is something that must be worked on over a long period of time and engagement and outreach is all about time. There are instances where we have posted on Pinterest and Instagram and they haven’t gone ‘viral’ for 3-5 months later. All of a sudden people are sharing and commenting and not everyone likes it. This is an important point. Not everyone is always going to love what you post. Don’t lose your temper and don’t bury your head in the sand because once you post it you can’t control what people do with it and it is very simple to trash your online presence with a heated argument.
Don’t be afraid to try, but if it ever seems like too much call in a professional. A Social Media Manager will help set things up and get the posts going and deal with all the comments etc. There are many ways to make social media work for you, with a bit of trial and error you’ll find the one that works for your business.
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