If your business is just getting started in social media, or even if you’ve been doing a pretty good job of consistently posting on different platforms, figuring out what you should be sharing can be challenging. We’ve got some great ideas to help you keep your business top of mind and engaged with your customers.
- Know your audience. Are most of your clients on Facebook or LinkedIn? What about Instagram and TikTok? You’ll want to have a presence where your customers are. And if you’re not sure – just ask them!
- Share local news. It’s never a bad idea to share what is happening in your community – things happening in your neighborhood or town. Tagging other businesses and your city will allow you to grow connections and gain exposure on their social networks, as well as yours.
- Post tips and advice. Show your connections that you have great ideas, share how to use your product, or give tips on how your customers can enhance the services you offer.
- Consider using humor. If it suits your brand, industry, or appeals to your clientele, think about incorporating some light-hearted content into your posts. Tastefully humorous posts can attract more people and make it easier to stand out in a newsfeed. This is also the type of content that others tend to share.
- Use images and video. Whenever possible, include images or video clips in your social media posts. People are very visual and a post with a picture attracts more attention – not just from users but from the social network itself.
- Be consistent. Try to spend 30-60 minutes a day focused on your social media accounts. Generate new content, share the content of others, and add comments to the posts of your clients.
- Vary your content. Experts suggest that you mix up your content to keep followers and subscribers interested. Examples of content can be employee highlights, company history, new products, seasonal product favorites, unboxing clips, fun facts, special holidays, charitable causes you support, etc. Whatever you post, try to be entertaining or educational.
- Connect with clients and prospects, and if they follow you, be sure you follow them back.
- Be positive. It’s common to see negative content on social media. Social media should be focused on engaging with clients and prospects in a meaningful way and fostering those relationships.
- Don’t overshare. Although you probably believe it unlikely to happen to you, there are many businesses on social media who tend to bombard their social media with too much content too often. Oversharing can lead to people unfollowing or unfriending just to stop seeing posts from a person or a business. The best way to avoid falling into this habit is to plan and schedule your posts in advance. This may sound daunting, but there are several web tools that can make this fairly simple – and they’re free! One great one that we use is Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com), but there are others you can find online, as well.
Social media is just another tool in your marketing toolbox that allows others to see who you are and to understand what your business does. Using different social media platforms takes practice, but you can’t grow your online presence without taking those baby steps to get started.