Social media can improve and enhance your brand’s online reputation in a drastic way if utilised efficiently. It can also be a confusing concept for businesses and success can be hard to measure in terms of ROI. When it comes to “getting it right” there are many ways harmonising a company’s social media accounts can reap rewards though.
Social media channels do have the perception that they are untrustworthy especially when it comes to ads on Facebook and Twitter. The “sponsored” text below the ad is sometimes an automatic turn off if the audience has not been targeted properly. However gaining customers’ trust using social media can enhance your brand reputation.
One important rule of business is to follow your audience and appear where your audience is found, both online and offline.
Social media channels for businesses can include:
- 30 million businesses now have a Facebook fan page
- 19 million businesses have optimised their fan page for mobile
- 51 per cent of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products
- 42 per cent of users learn about new products through Twitter
Snapchat
- Snapchat has about 30m active monthly users. A further 55 per cent of users use Snapchat daily – around 16.5m people
- Snapchat was the fastest growing digital platform in 2014, growing by 57 per cent
- One in three professionals on the planet are using LinkedIn
- LinkedIn is used in at least 200 different countries
Google+
- 70 per cent of brands have a presence on Google plus
- 41 per cent of business-to-consumer marketers and 39 per cent of business-to-business marketers use Google+ to source new business
- Instagram has 100m monthly users – a large audience for your brand
- 57 per cent of the top brand marketers are averaging at least one post per week
- 49 per cent of users have purchased 5 or more products that they have “pinned”.
- 25 per cent of consumers have reported buying a product/service after finding it on Pinterest
Blogs
- More than 60 per cent of US online consumers claim to have made purchases as a result of reading a blogger’s recommendation
- 65 per cent of daily internet users read a blog
My top ten tips:
(1) Tailor. Social media channels are all different and aimed at different audiences – content suitable for Twitter may not necessarily engage your LinkedIn audience.
(2) Do be personal, give a personality to your brand and enhance communication. No one likes to see the same message posted to someone else, tailor it by using a name. Do not however treat it like you would a personal account, relevancy is key.
(3) Respond to both positive and negative posts. When communicated to effectively angry customers could be persuaded to return and with it being common knowledge that retaining is cheaper and easier than acquiring this is invaluable to a brand.
(4) Engage with audiences by running competitions, using third party tools such as Woobox. This can be a great way to increase likes and improve brand awareness.
(5) Learn from competitor’s successes and mistakes to constantly improve your own approach.
(6) Analyse posts to see which get better results, what works for your audience? Timings can be crucial so continue to test when your audience is online.
(7) Use imagery and video to communicate, it is a proven fact that images are easier to digest. Infographics are a great way of displaying information in an original and unique way, which makes it likeable and shareable.
(8) The @ sign – when using Twitter do not start a tweet with “@” as only the followers who follow you and the user you are tweeting will see this. If “@” is not the first character everyone will see the tweet, so many users take to putting a “.” in front to make sure the tweet is viewable by all, “.@”.
(9) Using sites such as Hootsuite will allow you to schedule posts on many platforms in advance, meaning you can plan messages to followers weeks in advance and not have a panic if you forget to post (as long as you have remembered to schedule).
(10) Hire a social media manager. If you can afford it and don’t have the time to manage all of your companies social media accounts (it is very time consuming and hard to write content for different audiences) these specialised people have the time to tailor posts and tweets to the right audience.
Social media can feel like a minefield and will take time to build an audience of dedicated followers, but the hard work will pay off if your business is right for social. My best advice would be to consider what platforms are right for your business rather than feeling the need to be found on all platforms.
It is much better to work really hard on one platform and do a fantastic job rather than be on all platforms doing a mediocre job. If you don’t think your business is right for social media, check out what your competition are doing and see if it appears to be successful, it may be your efforts are better spent on other areas of marketing.
For more advice feel free to post any questions below.
Image: Shutterstock
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