Four Social Media Tips For Small Businesses
As a small-business owner, you are busy and your time is limited. Social media is ubiquitous and may seem like a great way to communicate with hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of people really quickly, but it will only work if you do it right.
1 Know your audience
The first thing you want to do is figure out who you want to reach – new customers; existing customers; past customers or a more targeted group? For new customers, specify as much about your ideal client as you can. Are they male or female? How old are they? What hobbies do they have? What social media do they use regularly? There are, of course, more details you can add, but you must build a picture of your perfect punter.
If you want to talk to existing customers, find out what social networking sites they use the most. You can make free surveys online, hold focus groups, ask questions on relevant forums and more. If they don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter, there’s no point in creating an account. Your target audience should dictate the social network(s) you are on, so once you know where they like to hang out, it’s easier to establish a goal.
2 What’s your goal?
You should know exactly what you want to achieve. Do you just want to provide another channel of communication between your business and your customers? Are you trying to increase awareness of your brand? Are you looking for another way to distribute great content? There are loads of things you can do with social media, but don’t try to do them all. Identify your most important goal and focus on that.
Whatever your goal, it’s a good idea to incorporate your social media activities into everything you do. Web design software makes it easy to integrate social elements on your website, and you can talk about your social media accounts in your newsletter, as well as list the social media links on your marketing materials. It also works the other way. Use your social media channel(s) to deliver relevant, useful information to your customers.
3 Plan your time
How much time can you commit to social media? If you can only spare a few hours a week, you may not see much of a return for your time. In fact, having a poor social presence can be more damaging to your brand than not having any – it will seem like you’re ignoring your customers. You’ll need to work on your account consistently to build momentum and a reputation.
If the responsibility will be shared among two or more people, consider creating some basic guidelines so everyone knows what is expected of them. Among other things, it’s important for everyone to use the same tone of voice to maintain brand consistency.
Much like Rome, nothing awesome is built in a day. If you’re expecting to see positive results in a few weeks, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Allow at least six months before evaluating how well you are doing, then decide whether you want to continue.
4 Monitor your success
You should regularly monitor the impact of all of your marketing – including any social media activities. How you do that will relate directly to the goal you set. If your goal was to offer a fast way for customers to ask you questions (to reduce incoming support emails and calls), find out if it worked. There are a lot of different calculations you can do that involve percentages, comparisons to last period’s figures, and time spent per query, or, you could use the built-in analytics in your social media accounts.
However, you might get a better understanding of how you are serving your customers by simply asking them. Again, you can make use of free survey software, emails, focus groups, etc. If your customers love the new social media support option (and it’s actually being used enough so you can devote less resources to your traditional support methods), it is a good idea to keep it.
The underlying key points are these: while social media is free, it takes a lot of your (or someone else’s) time to research, plan, promote, execute and assess your activities. You’ll want to see a return on investment at some point, so you should only do it if you are going to do it well.
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