Social media works best when you set out clearly defined goals in your strategy. I’m going to discuss the most popular and achievable goals that can be reached through social media to supercharge your business.
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- Build rapport with existing clients – This is something small businesses are generally quite good at offline, but when it comes to the conversations around their brand online, little effort is made to engage and interact with these customers. Even if it’s just a quick thank you, people really appreciate this. You can go even further and surprise your customers with a special discount or freebie. Going beyond the expectation of your customer will really make their experience memorable.
- Create an online community – establish yourself as an authority in your industry by publishing credible articles, reviews, videos and photos. Reaching out to influential industry leaders is a great way to get your business known fast. These people will have substantially larger networks than yours and will come in handy if they ever promote your content.
- Laser target your ideal audience – One of the major advantages of social media is that you can perform searches on Twitter around your industry keywords, hot topics and locations to find the right people to connect with. ‘Facebook Ads’ goes a little deeper and offers a targeting system that can drill down to any demographic. You can refine your search according to age, location, marital status, interests, education, where they work and more!
- Connect with prospects where they spend a ton of their time. People are spending more and more time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other networks to engage with their favourite brands and chat to their friends. The uptake of social media is actually accelerating, so now is the best time to get started, your competition already has.
- Create buzz around an event, promotion, competition – One of the main attractions to social media is the huge reach these major networks offer. With over 800 million Facebook users and 175 million Twitter users, these networks are perfect for spreading your message far and wide in a very short space of time better than any print or direct mail campaign could ever achieve. Of course the content of your post out has to be shareable and social, otherwise this will reduce the likelihood of a viral uptake.
- Peer-to-peer recommendation – The most powerful form of marketing is word-of-mouth or peer-to-peer recommendation. For example, if a family member or friend was to recommend a business to you, usually they have had a good experience with that business, therefore instantly creating trust between you and the business because you trust and value your friend’s opinion (as long as you trust your friend!). Just think of how many times you’ve been to the cinema, restaurant or a gig based on what your family and friend(s) have said about it. 92% of people surveyed below trust completely/somewhat, “recommendations from people I know”.