How to Use Social Media to Boost Business
As social media becomes an even larger driving force in marketing, creating great content is vital to expanding your brand. Statista reports that 78 percent of the U.S. population alone have at least one social media profile, and a little less than half of that percentage rely on social media to gather information on a brand or product. Here are three of the most used social media platforms and how they can help you expand your brand.
Facebook is by far the biggest and most used social media platform. Advantages of Facebook include tools to organically grow your social media presence. These tools can help you grow your business’s online presence, creating awareness, earning consumer loyalty, boosting sales, and driving users to explore online or in store. Tools include Pages, Messenger, and Instagram.
Creating a Facebook page allows you to connect with customers in an online community. You can upload photos and videos of your products or services, create posts that encourage discussion and interaction, and include your business’s values, goals, and contact information. Content should be emotionally appealing so users will want to engage through likes, shares, and comments. Pages are also able to connect to customers through Messenger, quickly communicating with a user.
Instagram is a Facebook tool with a large, interactive following of its own (75 percent of users take monetary action on a post they like). In June 2016, Instagram moved away from its chronological algorithm and now prioritizes a user’s feed by their interests. Top posts are from pages they’ve interacted with the most, so the key to winning a top spot is engagement. Your posts should be a visually appealing journey. A post that moves a user is more likely to receive likes, comments, and shares as well as a higher chance of a user buying your product or service.
This organic engagement is even more obtainable with Instagram’s newest update, which allows regular posts to use the carousal feature in sponsored ads. Again, user interaction is key, and you can use this feature to upload photos and videos highlighting multiple products or services. You can also use it to tell a story with a specific product or service.
Twitter can be tricky, as you only have 140 characters to share your message, and with an average of 6,000 tweets tweeted per second, you don’t want your tweets to be buried at the bottom of a feed.
One big key to a successful Twitter account is followers. Finding high-profile figures in your industry and interacting with them will lead to more exposure for your profile. For your current followers, keep up the favorites, retweets, and responses to let them know you appreciate their follow. Create polls asking for their feedback and input. People like feeling valued.
Hashtags are also great ways to expand your reach because non-followers can discover you through them. Keep it simple. Use only one or two hashtags to keep the tweet focused on its message. Of course, you can’t gain followers or engagement without relevant and interesting content. Your tweets need to make a statement that people will connect with.
An important thing to remember about social media is quality over quantity. It’s better to post great content a few times a week on your social media pages than to post mediocre content every day. From there, it’s simply a chain reaction. If a user likes your post, they’re more likely to engage with it, which their followers or friends will see. If that group likes it, they’re more likely to engage as well, and so on. Remember: A great post makes a great free ad.
About the Author: Constantina Kokenes is a new addition to the SEO team at Kabbage, a small business loans provider. She holds a Master’s degree from Northwestern University, where she learned how to create content that could best be organically shared. When not in the marketing world, Constantina enjoys playing games and singing along to the Law & Order: SVU theme song.