The importance of social media has increased over last few years. Today, nobody can imagine a business without social media presence. A proper social media campaign can yield fruitful results for your business.
Social media is essentially a great way to grow your business. Business relationships can be enhanced and nurtured while promotions can tie in more organically with your overall marketing and branding efforts.
Here’s a look at five ways social media can become a win-win for your company.
1. Leverage real-time engagement.
Social media can help you increase your brand awareness and boost interaction with prospects or potential customers in real-time. For instance, when a customer has a question, or issue they can voice it on social media and you can respond and solve it. As a small business marketer, identify the social networks where your customers spend time and actively engage with them.
2. Create community value.
Social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and so on have very active communities. You can find a community within your niche by identifying keywords, hashtags and discovering customer interests. Then start offering valuable advice to the niche communities in your targeted social platforms.
In a short period of time your authority in that community will increase gradually and you will be seen as expert in your niche. Once you have earned trust and goodwill you can start referencing product or services that will solve their problems. This can work wonders if implemented with right planning.
3. Create content to fuel your sales funnel.
Content marketing is a very important marketing tool; a tool that can also drive results for your inbound (and overall) marketing strategy. Creating content that can attract people in your niche and distributing it across targeted social media platforms will improve awareness and user engagement. Ensure your content is relevant and useful.
First, understand your sales funnel (the process you want your customers to experience as they go from prospect to lead to customer to repeat customer) and then create targeted content for your audience that addresses their needs at each step of your funnel. This can be very useful technique if you follow a well-planned content strategy.
4. Build influencer relationships.
Using social media is a great way to find and interact with influencers in your niche. Social media influencers often have a strong (in numbers and relevance) and committed following. If they get the word out about your business then you are likely to gain attention from their followers.
You can build relationships with influencers on Twitter by commenting and re-tweeting their content, share their blog posts on social media, make useful comments on their blog, etc. You can also invite influences to sample your products and services for free and request a review or quick feedback (i.e. a testimonial) and then share it in your marketing and press efforts.
5. Support social efforts with paid promotion.
Almost all established social media networks offer paid promotion for businesses and brands. If you have a small marketing budget then social media paid promotion is a viable and proven option. Often, paid social media campaigns can yield higher conversions than other types of traditional media.
For instance, Facebook advertising offers a highly targeted paid promotion opportunity that has the potential to increase leads. You can reach people who are more likely to engage with you and your content.
This article has been edited and condensed.
Gaurav Kanabar is the Founder and CEO of Alphanso Tech, an India based IT Consulting company that provides software solutions. Connect with @alphansotech on Twitter.
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