10 steps for social media success
Social media marketing is a great tool for small businesses and one
that you just cannot ignore. The number of people engaging in social
media networks every single minute is so big and if your business is not
participating in this mega digital party, you are missing out
opportunities.
Obviously the next question is how can business owners take advantage
of social media and whether it is something that can generate business
results (i.e. more traffic, sales, leads, signups) or if it is just
another myth?
#1 – Let’s get started
The first step is to actually move from theory to practice and get started with social media. This means 4 things:
- To allocate some time on a daily basis to work on your social media presence
- To choose which social media networks to use at the beginning since
there are too many and it will be very difficult to do all at the same
time.
- To create your business pages on those networks
- To SEO optimize your social media profiles for more exposure
Some things to consider:
Facebook – Everybody is on Facebook so you don’t actually have a choice here. Read this to get inspired: How to get your first 10,000 fans on Facebook. Note: Since that article was written, the page has now more than 45,000 fans.
Pinterest – It’s growing rapidly and can send a lot
of traffic to a website so this is your next choice provided that you
have something visual related to your business that you can share on
Pinterest.
Twitter – millions of users, easy to maintain and
good way to engage with your customers. Together with the previous 3,
this is your priority list.
LinkedIn – Mainly for business professionals, more
difficult to use, advertising is expensive. You can create your presence
on LinkedIn but if you are short of time, I suggest you start using
LinkedIn for your personal profile and then when you grow your business
profiles on the other networks, you can utilize LinkedIn for your
business as well.
#2 – Start Small
When you are ready to get started do not rush into following hundreds
of people, posting many times per day and checking your statistics
every minute. Start small and have in mind that:
- Social Networks do not like too much activity on newly created accounts (it’s not normal and kind of spammy)
- All networks have a maximum number of actions (following and
unfollowing) you can do per day so the best way is to stay below their
radar.
- At the beginning and when you don’t have a good number of followers,
nobody will see your posts so don’t spend your time for no reason.
#3 – It’s a numbers game
While there are millions of people in social media channels, in order
to start getting traffic, making sales or have any influence at all,
you need to have a LOT of followers in your networks. And by a LOT, I
mean a LOT and let me explain why.
When you publish a new post on your business page on Facebook that
post will be seen by a small percentage of your followers (FB tells you
how many people saw your posts so have a closer look to understand what I
mean).
Let’s say that you have 400 fans on your page, when you post
something only 30-40 people will see it and this is because FB does not
show the posts to all your fans.
The other networks may show your posts to all your followers but if a
person is following a lot of other people/pages, there are limited
chances that they will see and interact with your posts.
So, the more followers you have, the greater are your chances of
start getting anything out of social media. From my experience and
without this being a definite guide, you need at least 10,000 on FB,
1000 on G+, 1000 on Twitter and 2000 on Pinterest before seeing any
visitors to your website or shop. Of course as I said this is not a rule
but an empirical figure.
#4 –Follow people that matter
Unless you are a known brand, in order to grow your followers you
need to follow other people and some of them will follow you back. When
choosing who to follow be selective by applying these simple techniques:
- Follow people that have a relation with your business either
geographically (i.e. they live in the same area) or by interest (they
are interested directly or indirectly in the products or services you
are selling).
- Follow people who have an active profile; there is no reason to
follow someone on twitter if they haven’t posted anything for two
months.
- Follow people that have a balance between the people they follow and
people following them – you don’t want to follow people that will not
follow you back and also you don’t want to follow accounts that only
have following and no followers
- Follow people that have something interesting to say – before
following someone have a look at what they share and decide if this is
something your customers would like to see in your profile.
- Find and follow the influencers in your niche – every business area
and niche has influencers and although they will not follow you back,
it’s always a good practice to connect with them and follow what they
have to say about the industry.
#5 – It’s time consuming – make sure you have the time
Social media marketing is relatively easy to do but it is a very time
consuming task. Before starting make sure that you have the time to do
this consistently and on a daily basis. I would say that a couple of
hours per day is enough to get you started.
If this sounds a lot then you can either consider to outsource social media to professionals or start with fewer networks (for example Facebook only) and then when you find time jump in to the rest.
Have in mind though that if you don’t spend the necessary time
working your business pages, you will be disappointed by the results and
start believing that social media does not work for business (an
assumption that is totally wrong).
#6 – Make your posts interesting
If you already have a content marketing strategy then your work on social media will be easier but if you don’t, then you need to come up with a plan along these lines:
- Post about your products and services but don’t overdo it – Your
business page is about your business but if you keep posting about how
nice your products are, you will keep people away.
- Instead you should make your posts interesting by providing tips,
advice, offers and anything else that can make someone share or comment
in your posts.
- Don’t forget that in order to get any likes, +1s or comments you
need to have a LOT of followers. Don’t expect this to happen in the
first few months or when your numbers are still low.
#7 – Timing does matter
The time and date you post something in social media matters a lot.
As mentioned above, people have a lot of posts in their timelines and if
they don’t see it ‘live’ then most probably they will never see it.
For example, if you post something on twitter and your followers are
sleeping at that time, by the time they will wake up they will have
hundreds of messages in their timeline and so there is no chance of
seeing your post.
To solve this problem, you can use tools like bufferapp
to schedule your postings so that you reach your target audience at a
time where you have more followers online. There are also other tools
and statistics about the best time to post on the different social
networks but as a rule of thumb, post either in the morning (08:00 –
9:00) or afternoon (17:00 – 19:00). These are the times that work best
for many niches.
#8 – Follow up comments and mentions about your business
Social media is about communication and this means that you need to
monitor your social media pages for comments about your business and
definitely respond to both good and bad comments. You need to show your
audience that you are reading what they have to say and care about their
opinion.
Besides monitoring your business pages, you should also monitor the
mentions about your brand name in across all social networks and take
action where appropriate. A nice tool to do that is mention (it’s not free).
#9 – Measure the results and ROI
If you don’t measure the effectiveness of social media then you won’t know if it worth’s your time or not. What to measure?
- Number of visits from social media to your website
- Number of conversions (sales, newsletter signups, etc)
- Monthly increase of followers
- Monthly increase of interactions
How to measure?
Note: If you still at the beginning then most
probably those numbers will be low or close to zero but don’t get
disappointed, once you grow your followers you will notice that these
numbers will start to increase as well.
#10 – If everything fails, leave it to the pros
Social media works for businesses and this is a fact.
It is also true that every problem has a solution so if you don’t have
the time or knowledge to make social media work for your business then
leave it to the pros; we have different social media packages for each budget and need and we guarantee minimum results.
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