Social media, it’s a thing − a big thing. And as a small business website, being able to understand and properly use social media for business is critical. Being an active online participant has proven time and again to increase brand awareness, leads, sales, traffic and search rankings.
Monitoring social media success and knowing how to do it effectively still remains a challenge. Then, converting these fans and followers into qualified sales becomes an even greater challenge.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should shy away from activating social media. It only means that you should start thinking more strategically about how you operate these channels.
Investment vs. Opportunity
One of the most important factors to keep in mind for any social media plan is to have a definite goal. Each social media campaign and each post or piece of content should connect to your goal.
The “keep it simple, stupid” philosophy applies. Social media takes time, persistance and panache and not every campaign is meant to bring in the big bucks — even though that would be real nice. You will see a return on investment, but first you need to pay attention to the return on opportunity.
Success can be measured in a number of ways. Maybe you want to drive people to sign up to your email newsletter, “Like” your Facebook business page, follow you on Twitter or drive more traffic to your website or blog. The goal of social media should always be to capitalize on opportunity and small wins. Sometimes, you have to climb the mountain to see the view.
Social media is all about influence and reach and getting an email address is as good as gold. The more people you collect in your database the higher chance you have of converting them into customers. It’s simply a numbers game; and social media helps you increase those numbers through a variety of channels.
Quality Counts
Whatever your goal is for social media marketing, understand that quality counts. You could have a million Twitter followers and still have a hard time closing sales.
This means purchasing followers or have just anyone pay attention to you isn’t going to cut it. You want your target audience, or people who will most likely buy, to read your content. Don’t assume that because you’ve made a page or sent out a tweet that your top customers will find you. Take a moment, and find them. Let them know you are available here, here, there and anywhere else.
You can also take your existing customer database and find them. A simple search will tell you a lot, especially where they hang out online and how they interact with competitors and similar brands. This also applies to anyone wanting to increase traffic to their site. You don’t have to be selling something to get people’s attention.
Get Started
Start with your website analytics and see where your visitors are coming from and keep checking back for changes.
Once you have a clear idea of what you want to do and where, you can start building out a social media content calendar. Be sure to map out your goals and make every post count toward something, even if you only have one goal to start.
Next step, let us know how you did and what worked.
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