The Best Ways to Use Social Media for Business

The best social media marketing aligns company and client goals for maximum effectiveness.

Social media is fast becoming a primary form of both customer and company engagement.

In order to level the playing field when it comes to marketing and communication, your business, however big or small, can now use social media to tell your story and have your leads and customers connect with your company.

The traditional forms and forums of marketing are slowly becoming obsolete and social media is governing every aspect of marketing your business.

Therefore, as a marketer, you need to be acutely aware just how social media has fundamentally changed the way we are connecting, communicating and collaborating as individuals, and therefore society as a whole. The key to social media success is to focus on how you can use these social media networking sites more effectively to:

• Increase brand awareness and visibility
• Build and cultivate networks
• Develop and grow relationships with customers and influencers
• Communicate with your community of followers and influencers

Before you can begin setting up Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, you will need to understand how it is that you could make the most of your social media platforms and convert it into results for your business.

1. Content will be your Weapon

   When it comes to social media, the only way to gather more traction is through content. Creation and distribution of original content that informs, empowers, educates and/or entertains – aim to create content that goes viral and will attract the right kind of leads to your brand

   Here are a few tips in order to create magnificent content:

   • Define your audience – Know well the kind of audience you want, who they are, what they know, and — more importantly — what they don’t. This can help you curate your content.
   • Have a well drafted content calendar – this is one of the best approaches to tackle your content needs. A content calendar will help you plan out when to post what and where.

2. Paid Advertising to attract New Customers

   Paid advertising is a great way to ensure that you attract the right kind of leads to your handle. In order to ensure maximum benefit of paid advertisement, you must ensure that your segmentation is done perfectly. Placing paid ads on social media networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn requires a very small budget and can help you target your audience using age, gender, location and interests, among other demographics.

3. Communicate and engage

   Your social handles provide you the chance of interacting with your leads at no cost. Therefore you must utilise it really well. Here are a few tips to do so:

   • Share user generated content on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
   • Answering people’s questions, respond to direct messages and comments.
   • Joining the conversation on a particular topic – this could be a group on Twitter talking about a certain issue that’s sprung up through the media, or joining a LinkedIn Group

4. Optimize the company’s website to enable social sharing

   Whether you are an e-commerce website or blog, optimizing your company’s website to add direct social sharing buttons is a good idea. Through these buttons, readers can share the content immediately to their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest handles, or even through mail and WhatsApp options. By doing so, not only are you providing convenience to your readers, but also increasing your reach simultaneously.

With the help of these tips, you could ensure that you get maximum return on your social media efforts.