Do you need social media for your business?

If you want to be more involved with your customers, you should take advantage of social media.

Building yourself a social media campaign can be daunting and time consuming. But if you want to increase brand awareness and reach out to new customers you need to consider using at least one social media platform.

The article "How to Decide which Social Media Channels to Be On" written by Jenn Chen from Sprout Social reveals that 31% of consumers prefer reaching out to businesses via social media.

What are Your Goals?

With social media, you can build your community, listen to your customers, increase brand awareness and keep tabs on your competitors.

By defining your goals you can point to the specific steps you need to take. When you build your community you are encouraging conversations with your target audience and further building your relationship with them.

Tips on building a community

• Leverage user-generated content
• Be responsive, engage and don't ignore comments
• Focus on helping over selling
• Create diverse content
• Develop a consistent tone of voice

Tips on increasing brand awareness

• Understand your Audience
• Create Visual Content
• Use Paid distribution
• Track your performance
• Create channel specific content

Tips on competitor analysis

• Identify your main competitors
• Analyse your competitors online presence
• Analyse their business strategy
• Where have other brands succeeded or failed?
• Use 3rd party companies to gather metrics

Which platform is right for you?

By understanding what type of business you are, you can begin to refine your campaign.

Are you B2C or B2B?

B2C = Business to Consumer

A business that sells products and services directly to the consumer

B2B = Business to Business

A Business that sells products and services to solve problems for other businesses

While there are plenty of platforms to choose from, its best to know how they work so your choice is easier. By understanding the demographics for these platforms, you can fine tune your advertising to reach your ideal target market.

If you think of social media platforms as tools, below is a list of what they can do.

Facebook

• Low cost adverts
• Targeted ads
• Supports various media types
• Drive traffic to your website
• Large user base (More potential customers)
• Access to Meta Business Suite (Manage your metrics)
• Paid adverts are cheaper than Google
• Suitable for B2C more than B2B

Instagram

• Focusses on visual style
• Built in ad manager to track sales and potential leads.
• Supports e-commerce profiles
• Utilise user Generated content (Other users sharing your posts)
• Shoppable posts (A post with the option to buy a product)
• Access to Meta Business Suite (Manage your metrics)
• Link websites and stores into your Bio
• Suitable for B2B and also B2C

X (Formerly Twitter)

• Stay up to date with industry news and trends
• Build relationships with influencers and industry leaders
• Drive traffic to your website or other socials
• Use of @ tags encourage engagements
• Best platform for showcasing your brand voice
• Free use of Tweetdeck (customise and control your feed)
• Influencers can boost your campaigns
• Suitable for B2C more than B2B

Tik Tok

• High user engagement (find a target market faster)
• ‘Stitch’ & ‘Duet’ allow for more involved user generated content
• Link with influencers
• Light-hearted and casual approach to content
• Boost B2C Business (wider audience available)
• Tik Tok Ad Manager (create custom paid ads)
• Suitable for B2B and also B2C

There are five main types of social media content, Videos, images, text, stories and live video. The content you create will influence your choice on choosing a social media platform.

Once you have decided on a platform, consider the type of content you would like to post and which platform will support it. For example, Tik Tok is a Video only platform where as Facebook can support videos, images and URLs to name a few.

Finally, consider your ability to create content, do you have a backlog of content readily available to upload to your new social media page, or have you got a team to manage the content?