To say you are involved in Social Media has always been a bit like growing a beard, squeezing into some skinny jeans and drinking real ale in Shoreditch… ultimately in the digital marketing world, it is perceived as being cool! Now I would never pretend to know what is cool or not, but I do know that Social Media can offer some very exciting opportunities if it is used right, to counter that it also has its limitations. Here are my top 5 tips to using social media:
1) Customer Service
With over 1.59 billion monthly active users on Facebook alone you can be pretty sure that your customer uses social media in some capacity. With this in mind many brands have had little option but to use their social channels as a way of handling customer service issues. Customers see social channels as a very fast, convenient and public way of demonstrating their annoyance if they don’t get the service they want. Make sure you commit to this channel as it can quickly turn on you if you neglect it.
2) Engage with existing customers
Creating a network of followers/fans is a great way of building relationships with existing customers. It gives your business a free platform to promote and engage with your customer base 24 hours a day if you wish. Ensure your posts and content is interesting and relevant. With content being so readily available, make sure that your content is not too product focused or sales focused as this is likely to put your users off.
3) Get new customers
Using the paid element of social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc) to increase the volume of people your message reaches is an incredibly powerful way of increasing awareness and traffic to your site. Don’t underestimate the importance of engaging content as regardless of how targeted your sponsored posts are, if the content is boring or unoriginal then it will not hit the mark. Remember that posts that achieve engagement with existing customers can offer an insight into what your target audience like so don’t be scared to re-post existing content to the wider world.
4) Customer profiling
Having a platform to publish your own content and targeting your own (opted in) audience is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Social Media allows you to build data-driven customer profiles by simply analysing your following. You can build data on Sex, Age, Location, Socio-economic group, occupation, etc. This information should help you guide how you run all other areas of your business and how you should go about marketing it.
5) Content Outreach
Building high-quality links to your website is (we are constantly being told) the difference between high and low search rankings. There is one major challenge we all face when we put this theory into practice and that is actually getting the links that will save us from the Google scrapheap. Great quality content is the answer but finding a way to outreach your content without the help of an expensive PR/SEO agency is very difficult. Social Media is a great way to publish and distribute high-quality content to 1000’s of potential users, if your content is good enough then the buzz social media creates will lead to publishers picking up your content and the links will follow.
Social Media is a powerful but fickle eco-system. If you need help building a Social media strategy get in touch with Clicksmith today. There is no “one size fits all” approach, every business needs to look at what social can do for them.
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