For small businesses, setting up a social media presence can be a daunting prospect. It seems like there are so many different elements to take into account before you even create your first post. Many businesses still haven’t taken to using social media properly to help with their marketing. According to the ONS, in 2016 only 63% of businesses with 10 or more employees used social media. If you’re planning on taking the first step to creating a social media channel, here are a few pointers to help get you thinking about social media as part of an effective marketing strategy.
Which social media?
The first thing to consider is which social media sites you’re planning to use. Each has its own strengths and limitations, but it can be beneficial to use more than one of them, to reach different audiences.
Facebook is by far the largest social media platform, with an estimated 2.27 billion active monthly users. Whilst it still predominantly reaches a young audience, the demographics are changing, as younger people appear to be moving away from the platform, whilst users over the age of 45 continue to increase. Facebook allows you to use video, photo and written content on it, and allows site users to comment and react to any post you create.
Instagram is largely built for mobile phone users and, although it has a desktop version of its site, a user cannot post on it. It is entirely image and video based, meaning you cannot create a post without an image or video. Images and videos within Instagram are square, aside from those shared through Instagram’s story facility which are portrait, to fit a phone screen. The stories are temporary, short posts that appear on the top portion of the screen when something new is posted. They can be either photo or video, and allow the user to add filters, text, moving images etc. Instagram uses a hashtag ‘#’ system to help people find and share posts based on an interest.
Twitter is all about brevity and interaction across the whole site. Posts on Twitter are restricted to 280 characters, so keeping posts concise is the key to good messaging on Twitter. Twitter, like Instagram, uses the hashtag system to interconnect topics that people are talking about, making it searchable. Twitter provides a list of trending topics, which show what the world, country etc. is talking about, which can be useful for creating content. Twitter is the second most used social media site for business to business interactions, following in behind LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is seen as a social media for business and professionals. Hosting a jobs board, LinkedIn is a source of information, applications and connections for businesses and employees alike. It is largely built around networking and allows you to see who has viewed your profile, and whether you appeared in searches by employers. Being so heavily focused on networking, it is a great way to connect with other businesses, generate more business, and connect to a larger network to promote your business to new audiences. LinkedIn is a great place to get your business seen, with e-consultancy reporting that 64% of all website visits from social media come through LinkedIn.
Snapchat
Snapchat is image and video based, allowing users to share brief stories with their friends. It is built around temporary posts, which users can choose to watch, but are deleted afterwards. Snapchat predominantly has a young user base, with 77% being aged between 18 and 24. Famous for its filters, Snapchat has been used in innovative marketing campaigns that allow users to use augmented reality to ‘wear’ or ‘see’ something related to a brand through their own phone screens.
Setting up your channels
When the time comes to set up your channels, there are a few important things to keep in mind. Firstly, is the overall unity of your brand. When you see a company’s website, print marketing and social media, some of the things that immediately tell us that it’s the actual company we’re engaging with are the branding and design that are used. When putting together your page, use the same logo as on your main page, and make sure it appears clearly and is centred.
There are some platform specific considerations to make when setting up your social media. For example, on Instagram, it is wise to switch from a standard profile to a business one so that you have access to insights and paid promotion options. Being thorough with the information you include is also important. Most social media channels allow you to provide opening times, website, phone number, and location. Completing these fields where applicable will help potential customers to find and engage with your business.
When you have your channels set up, make sure you provide links to them on your website. Most commonly, these links are hyperlinked using the individual logos of each platform.
Social Media manager
Once you’ve chosen the social media channels and set them up, you should consider how you are going to run them. You could, if you decide to have only one channel, run them from the page itself. If you decide to have two, three, or four channels, it makes more sense to use a social media management tool. There are many examples of social media management tools, including Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, and Social Flow. Each of these allows you to operate and run all your social media channels from a single point, so you can post across multiple channels at once, schedule posts, and review comments all in one place. There are often free elements to these tools, but they do have pay gates restricting their full functionality, so if you want to use one of them, it’s important to budget.
Content
Content is what your audience will see and engage with when they view your social media presence, be it pictures, video, text, polls, or a mixture of them all. It’s the source of engagement, and there are some trends to take into account when you begin planning your content. Video is increasingly popular across social media. According to Hubspot, 72% would rather use a video to learn about a product or service than text, and 83% would consider sharing a video they enjoyed with their friends. Creating engaging and useful video for your social media channels can keep you one step ahead, and help you increase the reach of your posts.
That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t still create other content. Blog posts on your website are still an important part of marketing, and these should be linked to posts on your social media accounts. When you do create a post, using photos in your piece is much more effective than just text alone.
Considering the time you post your content can help you make the most out of each piece you share. For example, Facebook provides the highest engagement in the UK between Wednesday and Sunday from 12-3pm. Sproutsocial have prepared some handy charts to show when the best times to post is for each channel, which you can find here.
Paid Promotion/ Organic growth
Social media channels give you the opportunity to pay to advertise your page across the platform. With Facebook, choosing to promote a post could get your page seen by a significantly larger amount of people than organic growth. When promoting on Facebook, you are provided with the option of targeting certain people, based on sex, location, age and interests, which helps you refine down to target people who are likely to be interested in your product or service and can help your advertising budget extend further.
Organic growth is the natural growth of a page without paid promotion. In order to encourage organic growth, creating engaging and shareable content is the key. If people see something they are interested in, they’ll watch it, and may well share it with their friends, increasing the number of people who may see the post.
Analytics
Analytics allow you to see what works with your audience. Each site provides some kind of analytics to help you see how people are interacting with your content. Likes, shares, retweets, views, each count as an active engagement which is what you want. A passive engagement is users purely seeing your content appear in their feeds, but not interacting with it, which doesn’t help the promotion of your page. The key to increasing active engagement is once again to create good quality content that people are happy to view and share amongst others.
Using social media effectively could be an important step to promoting your business and increasing sales. If you decide which channels you’re going to use and learn how to adapt content across each of them, then you can make the most out of each channel. Keeping on top of your analytics will allow you to develop and implement the content that will help increase the presence of your business and encourage users to keep following you.
