HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA
Oct 29, 2012
If you are a business looking to build a bigger presence online, you really can’t avoid social media. You’d be missing out on the opportunity to connect with a large number of web users who could turn into customers.
There are over 30 million Facebook users in the UK and 10 million on Twitter, not to mention the thousands on Flickr, Tumblr, Google and other sites.
It may seem daunting at first, but once you’ve set yourself up on social media sites it’s fairly easy to gain a following. Here are a few tips from The Creation Lab to get you started:
What do you want to share?
Like any other marketing campaign, you need to have a clear objective when setting out on social media. Is it to drive sales, increase communication or improve customer service? Once you have a clear objective you’ll get a better idea of what to share online.
Humanise your Business
As personal as your website may be, having a regularly updated social media account gives an added human element to your business. You’d be surprised at how many people research a business before purchasing a product. If you have a presence on popular social media sites it shows you are business who keeps up to date.
Interact with your followers, but don’t get too personal as you don’t want to stray away from your brand identity. That said, avoid the trap of bombarding your followers with information they may not be interested in.
Seek Followers
Once you’ve set up an account, use the search tool to find like-minded businesses to network with. Twitter is great for this because you can follow people in one easy click. The more people you follow, the more followers you are going to get back. Facebook is more difficult, but if you encourage your friends to share the page, then you’ll soon see an increase in followers. You can also link your social media accounts together, so your Twitter followers, for example, are encouraged to move over to your Facebook page too.
Interact
The whole purpose of social media is interaction, so make sure you reply to questions, respond to feedback (whether good or bad) and acknowledge that your followers are human beings! You can initiate interactivity yourself by asking questions, posting competitions and creating polls.
Stay focussed
The key to successful social media campaigns is not to lose focus – you need to update your account daily to ensure enough people are seeing your page. For this reason it is more effective to have accounts on two or three sites, rather than spreading yourself thinly over many. Applications like Hoot Suite allow you to schedule posts in advance, so you only need to spend around an hour a week updating your accounts.
For more help with setting up and running social media accounts, feel free to talk to us at The Creation Lab.
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