There are clear and compelling reasons why SMEs and start-ups should be using social media as a marketing channel – not least the fact that millions of your prospective customers are there already, looking to befriend you – but how exactly do you go about doing it?
Of course there are many books on the subject, but to give you a taste of what you need to think about, here are our top tips.
Read On:
Five reasons social media is made for SMEs
How to track and measure social media marketing
Nine social media sins
Do your research
OK, so you could just open up twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts and start spewing out missives with links back to your site for great deals and introductory offers, but that is going to probably net you a load of people and brands many of whom you are not interested in having on board.
So, the first step is to identify what audience you want and where they are most likely to be found.
Make a list of the kind of people you are trying to target – age, gender, economic status, nationality and so on – and then start to tweak your site’s language and content so that it reflects the kinds of things that turn these people on.
Then go looking at the fundamentals of which social media network tends to attract the kind of people you are looking for.
For instance, Facebook is most widely used by pretty much all demographics, but as the Pew Research data in these images shows, Pinterest is more used by African Americans in the US under the age of 25, so if you are looking to target white middle class middle aged ladies, Pinterest isn’t the best place to do that.
Co-ordinate your social marketing efforts
While there are various audiences on each social media platform, the chances are you will be using more than one (if not all of them!) and you need to treat social media as a whole, not on a platform by platform basis.
Your website is the hub of your efforts, so what ever you are doing is centred on driving people to your site. That is the whole point of this. So when posting on social media, make sure that you link back to the right part of your site. Give them a teaser on social then pull them to your site.
Looking at it the other way around, your site also has to be socially friendly. It should encourage visitors and users to follow you and like you across a range of social sites, and this should be clearly designed into your site.
You should also encourage your visitors to be able to share your content, offers and details via their social media networks. Again, the call to action to do this should be prominent and clear and easy. This is perhaps your best bet for using social to market your brand.
It can also be an idea to incorporate your twitter feed into your home page design so that visitors can see your recent activity on social and then follow you.
Start small
This is perhaps the most important tip in getting going on social. It can be a great channel but it can also be extremely time consuming and all encompassing. So start small.
So choose one or two social media platforms then, to ensure consistency and regularity – and to help you work it into your day – block out the time on your calendar, turn off all distractions and dedicate time to managing your social media accounts. Do this in one or two different time slots every day.
In your first month or two, expect to spend a minimum of 15 to 30 minutes a day on social activities. You can increase the time as you see fit.
Use your audience profiling to look at the kind of content you want to post on social media under your brand and what material from third parties you want to curate in your timeline. You should aim to entertain and inform and to give the impression that you are expert in your chosen field, this will encourage interested parties to follow and like you.
To help you manage operations across several platforms – especially as you start to expand what you do to more and more social media channels – it is wise to look at a tool like HootSuite to allow you to manage several feeds and accounts from one place.
Listen and respond
One of the benefits of keeping on top of social media is that you can tune into what people who are interested in what you do are talking about – and to be able to offer advice and information to them. This will hopefully then see you imbued with the air of useful and helpful experts. It should also lead to a fair amount of traffic to your site as well.
If nothing else, this will help you curate interesting and relevant material on your social media feeds and get your brand out there and associated with being an expert.
To keep on top of this seemingly impossibly massive task, there are tools. Try Social Mention to help you get alerted when things you are interested in are mentioned.
Analyse
Once you have been doing the above for a month, look at what you have achieved. Put aside some time to analyse what your traffic patterns are on your site, whether sales are up and see if you can tie that back to anything specific you did on social media.
Also take a look at how many followers you have garnered on each social platform you have targeted and see which of your postings have attracted the most likes and retweets etc… And if you can identify what made them more popular see how you can do more of the same.
Of course when you start your will get a spike of sign ups and follows, but you should look to get a steady growth curve thereafter and understand what you post that really tickles people’s fancies then you are getting the hang of social media.
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