6 Ways to Boost Business Through Social Media
What is your most valued asset as a business owner?
Is it your time?
Is it your bottom line?
Social media has the power to consume or create your resources. It is not a quick and easy job. It is a long, time-consuming, 365-day-a-year task. It takes a lot of thought and detailed planning, but the results are totally worth it. So how do you effectively utilize social media? Here are six ways:
“It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.”
Gary Vaynerchuck, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
1. Take a Different Approach:
Don’t go into this social media thing with the mindset that you will be selling to your customers. (Yes, you will be selling at times, but don’t go into it thinking that way.) Vaynerchuk points out in his book that our customers aren’t on social media to buy. Social media users run to social media to escape, laugh, be entertained, socialize, and see what is going on in the world. So as a company, your goal with social media should not be to only sell your product. Your goal should be to connect with your customers, interact with them and to stay relevant in their world. To sum it up: give, give, give, give, and then you can take.
2. Be a Person:
Establish yourself as a person, not just a business. Your company should have a personality with multiple layers of who you are. For instance, if you are a greenhouse grower, you most likely don’t ONLY care about plants: you have feelings, you love animals, and you have kids or grandkids running around. Let your customers see your interests. Let them see the personality of your business, and more importantly take interest in their personalities and what they have to say about their own interests.
3. Be Fluent in Your Social Media Platform of Choice:
Whether you are new to social media, or you have been on the social media bandwagon from the beginning, do your research. Make sure that your posts on each social platform are not all identical. A good post on Twitter is not going to be a good post for Instagram. They have different atmospheres, and the consumers have different expectations on each platform. So know the language of the platform. Here is the breakdown of a few of the most common social media platforms:
- Used to connect, socialize, and catch up or keep in touch.
- Users are looking for fun, relevant, and useful content.
- This site can encompass all of your personality layers and emotions.
- You can share photos, videos, text posts, events, offers, message your customers, and much more.
- Used to have conversations with all who are interested in your topic.
- Users are looking for interesting conversations to join.
- Hashtags allow others to see what you are talking about, but don’t overuse them. Never use more than 2 hashtags in a single post.
- Used to edit and share pictures and videos, and to find and follow pictures of interest.
- Users are looking for artistic or interesting pictures. Your picture should be able to convey the message you are trying to send, or it should be so intriguing that your viewer wants to read your caption.
- This site encompasses more of your artistic side. Give them a look into your life with a picture that brings out the beauty in any ordinary object.
- You can share pictures and videos with captions. Make sure the first sentence catches peoples attention and makes them want to read more.
- With this platform, hashtags are key. Treat hashtags as searchable keywords and add as many as are relevant so others can find your posts.
- Used to expand on information you want to share.
- You can also share multiple links to specific products, blog posts, social media pages, and really have a conversation with your customers.
- Email is more personal than any other social media platform.
- Besides your website, email is the only platform you “own.”
- Used to save ideas, inspiration, and do-it-yourself projects.
- Users are looking for tutorials, crafty ideas, projects, interesting facts, and art.
- This platform should show your customer all the different ways that your product can be used. For example, a greenhouse grower could fill their Pinterest with gardening tips, layouts, and a tutorial on how to make a raised bed or other garden decorations.
4. Be Part of the Entertainment:
The thing that consumers hate most about marketing is when the marketing interrupts their entertainment. Commercials, pop up ads, and flashy banner ads are a few examples of this irritation. So your goal in marketing your company should be to flawlessly be a part of the entertainment. You can do this by creating posts that your viewers enjoy seeing. Think about the Super Bowl. Commercials are so well done during this time that people who aren’t even interested in football watch just to see what companies will do with the commercials. Companies who buy ad space during the Super Bowl work incredibly hard to make their commercials so entertaining that people remember and talk about them for months and even years following.
“A story is at its best when it’s not intrusive, when it brings value to a platform’s consumers, and when it fits in as a natural step along the customer’s path to making a purchase.” Gary Vaynerchuck, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
5. Create Emotion:
Good posts make the viewer feel something. When customers are scrolling through any social media newsfeed, only two things will get them to really stop and pay attention: 1) if the post strikes their interest, or 2) is if it strikes their emotion. Whether the post makes someone think “Aww, how cute,” or “Wow, that is amazing,” you’ve drawn their attention in. You are now in their thoughts any time they are reminded of that post. It works. In fact, I would dare say that if a post doesn’t pull at some emotion, then you aren’t going to get any real traction on it.
6. Seek Quality AND Quantity:
Both quality and quantity are important aspects of good social media. You must have both. With any social media, you are going to see the best and most recent first at the top of your page. It is only if you continue scrolling through your feed that you can see older posts. Why does this matter? Keep in mind that you are not the only one that is showing up on your customer’s news feed. You don’t want the non-stop pictures of her friend’s new baby or the neighbor’s new puppy to drown out the posts about your story. So you have to post often. At the very least weekly, if not daily. But you can’t post just any picture or quote. Live by the rule of thumb that if your post doesn’t have quality, then it’s not worth posting. Quantity is important but not at the cost of what a bad quality post can do to you. As mentioned before, effectively utilizing social media requires much thought and practice.
Make It Work for You
“The skill set it takes to be a successful entrepreneur… is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.” Gary Vaynerchuck, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
Follow these six steps and you’ll be well on your way to effectively connecting with customers and boosting business through social media. Being intentional takes the time you invest on each given platform and brings better returns. Done well, social media can get people talking about your business–and boost your bottom line!