How Social Media can Boost your Business

Social media is no new; at this point, you probably should understand that you can use the connection with your users or customers to boost your business.

But what exactly do you need to do to grow your business with social networks? Among other things, you must consider what you have to pay or not, which social networks are more compatible with your company’s goals, and the voice you should maintain so that all your strategy remains firm.

So, today we’re going to talk more about all this, giving you ten rules for using social networks and a small guide to make your strategy:

Ten rules for using social networks

1. Human communication

Users want to talk to people, not machines, so you try to give each community member a personalized treatment even though this always takes some time. Also, it is crucial that the company feels like a person when answering any comment. For this, a relatively poor strategy is to give your networks a character.

2. Always check the metrics

Numbers don’t lie. When something goes wrong with your social media metrics, you can use the information to change your strategy and create more good systems for your business.

For example, a design company can do quite well just by uploading images. But, if you work with baking, you might want to give away some of your own so that your followers can try to copy some of your recipes at home.

3. Your brand is not alone

One recent less conventional and more successful strategy has been the conversation between brands. For example, recently, a conversation thread between Wendy’s and Burger King became famous on Twitter. Stomach both brands in trend in the United States for almost two days.

But beyond the fact that these strategies attract a lot of public attention, they can allow you to connect directly with strategic alliances that facilitate your future.

4. The main idea is not to sell

A strategy focused directly on selling quickly breaks direct relationships with customers. On the contrary, if you have much more to offer in your social networks than just an invitation to buy your products or services, customers would become reliable allies of your brand. This trust is what keeps sales margins and loyalty high.

5. Make sure you offer decent response times

A grave mistake that many brands make is taking too long to respond to their followers’ messages. Again, it’s a question of reciprocity. You should always reply if a follower took the time and trouble to write to you. However, it is also crucial that you do so as quickly as possible.

6. If an Ally of authority

All markets, niches, and industries have to opinion leaders with authority highlighted in social networks. While in the fashion industry, there are dozens of influencers, in the personal and business developing world, there are walls that move millions of people where their opinion is directed.

Please communicate with the leaders in your niche, let them know what you are doing, and interact with them. This way, two things could happen:

Since the conversation is public, the users who follow that person will know your business. And on the other hand, there is always the possibility that you establish an excellent professional relationship with the opinion leader you are contacting.

7. Offer added value

The content is not just information. Also, when a follower is already thinking about becoming part of your customer base, they only need a slight push to buy your product or service. This is where value-added strategies come in. Among other things you can offer:

  • Discounts
  • Exclusive news
  • Didactic content
  • Discussions
  • Invitations to events

And it’s even possible to get quite a bit of attention from users in an industry if you take the time to contact some members of your competition to do promotions together.

8. the essential thing is to create a community

People don’t follow you on social networks to get your products directly. They do it for the information and possibilities they offer through the networks. So the best way to build loyalty is to show users that they are not alone.

Please communicate with your community, make sure you listen to their opinions, and publicly demonstrate a connection between them. Users who feel part of something bigger tend to be more loyal to the brand.

9. Choose the social networks that best connect with your business

Incredibly, one of the most common errors that can be observed at the level of social networking for business is the selection of accounts to be considered. To begin with, Instagram is not for everyone. Let’s explain this to you with some examples:

  • If your project is a news website, Facebook and Twitter are the best places to connect with users.
  • If you’re looking to start conversations with other brands, a Twitter thread that opens a discussion is much easier to follow than a Facebook post.
  • If you work with fashion, food, decoration, basically anything that sells visually, your social network of choice will be Instagram. However, Pinterest can be pretty helpful too.

On the other hand, Facebook is usually The Safest Bet since it allows you to create pages with shopping carts. However, it would help if other social networks supported you to activate your brand’s full potential.

10. It’s not free

Although registering on social networks is free, and you can have some reach with a good community strategy, you always have to pay. To explain it better, the difference in reach between a regular publication and a paid advertisement is genuinely abysmal.

For example, a standard Instagram post will have as much potential as the number of users that follow you. Otherwise, if you pay for the advertising of the post, it could reach millions of people.

If you follow these rules to the letter, you can probably design a social media marketing strategy that takes your business further. However, to help you a little more, we are going to offer you some steps to design your current and effective plan:

Steps to creating a social media plan

It’s important to know that your social media plan should be a written document that aligns the main points to work on when creating and managing content for your networks.

1. Make a diagnosis

To begin with, you need to start analyzing your brand, your target’s movement on the web, and the platforms on which they move. To do this, we need to work on asking you key questions:

  • What are my company’s main goals?
  • What is my target audience?
  • How is my product or service sold?
  • How do my sales funnel work?
  • What is my Internet presence?
  • What company represents my competition?
  • What does my match do on social media?
  • How is my brand different from others in the industry?

In addition, you must consider all the factors that relate to successful web development: content, search engine ranking, keywords, advertising, SEO.

2. Design of objectives

You know where you are, so we must start figuring out where we want to go. When designing the objectives of your social media marketing strategy, they must meet the following characteristics:

  • They must be specific
  • Measurable
  • Reachable
  • Realists
  • And to have time lapses for its realization.

Once you have reached this point, you will consider which social networks you should be present to start defining your content plan. Given the popularity of the networks and the number of users, Facebook is practically obligatory.

Beyond this, remember that you must choose the networks based on the activity and objectives of your company (keep in mind that for this step, you already know what the goals are)

To make it easier for you to decide, here we will talk about some social networks:

Linkedin: it is essential to include it in your Social Media campaigns if you work with B2B products.

Twitter: Here, the posts advance in real-time. For this reason, it is ideal for covering events and news.

Pinterest: Excellent for showcasing products, especially in niche female audiences (over 80% of active Pinterest users are women)

Instagram: Images, videos, stories, and the possibility of reaching an active and particular target through paid publications. Furthermore, it is the ideal network if you need to make yourself known with the support of influencers – as there are quite a few here.

3. Measure and evaluate

Once you have started launching content in your networks, you should always be aware of the result and look for improvements. In this case, you should evaluate the development of your funnel. About this, you must understand that the process moves in the following order:

  1. Dissemination
  2. Scope
  3. Community
  4. Interaction
  5. Conversion

Every type of content and every strategy you take on social networks is directed to one of these points. So when you see that very few users are moving from one point to another, it’s usually time to make changes in strategy.

At the End

At this point, you should have a clearer idea of how to design your content marketing plan. From this point on, you must decide the elements and strategies that will be part of your plan.

Keep in mind that you should always keep the same tone and handle the same information in all your profiles –Contradictory information generates distrust. We hope this blog is helpful to you. Stay tuned to learn more about funnel and direct social media marketing strategies in our upcoming posts.


Diana Muniz
Diana Muniz

With over 20+ years of experience in a variety of corporate and entrepreneurial environments, Diana has developed a great understanding of Marketing Strategy, Brand Development, Customer Success, Public Relations and Management. Her internal drive for developing others and external brands, has allowed her to work in some of the largest cities in the world including Milan, Paris, NY, Mexico, and the Middle East. This experience has been fundamental to Diana’s success and ability to communicate cross-culturally.

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