You can create a buzz – Get the word out about your products and services in a way that promotes online conversation and increases engagement.
Build relationships and become more personal – (expanding on the first point) Use a variety of social media, and you’ll build relationships with customers and potential customers. Trust comes through honesty and sincerity.
Branding – It is extremely important for a small business to create a recognizable identity for your product or service. This is the way the customer perceives you, and what better way to do this than the use of social media?
It opens up the line of communication between business owner and millions of potential customers – Millions of people who could possibly become customers? You could not have this easily in the offline world. Thank you social media!
Social networking with potential clients and customers from all over the globe – With social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter (among many, many others) you can hold personal conversations with each of your customers. Tell them about new products, sales and coupons, suggestions and tips – the topics are endless!
Small businesses can compete with the large companies – In the past, this was very difficult with the advertising and marketing budgets of large companies. With the right type of viral social media, you could potentially get an immense amount of traffic which keeps coming for a long time.
Online reputation management – Social Media is a good way to keep an eye on what other people are saying about your name, company, or brand online – and if any problems or complaints arise, they can be dealt with.
Social media is much cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising – Social media marketing shouldn’t cost a small business nearly as much as traditional advertising. If you do it yourself it might not cost anything at all. It will however cost you time. This is why it is a good idea to hire someone to help with the social media marketing.
Find out exactly what your customers want – Social media is amazing in so many ways, as you can see from the last 8 reasons. But, maybe one of the most amazing things about it is that you don’t have to wonder what your customers want. You want to know what they want? Just ask them!
It provides another way for potential customers to find you – If you’re not high enough in the search engines for potential customers to find you, don’t worry they can still find you through social media. Even if you’re not on the front page of Google, it doesn’t mean you can’t receive traffic.
So there you have it. All small businesses should take advantage of the benefits social media can provide you with, it’ a no-brainer!
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OK, so this is going to be (kind of) a rant about something that’s been bugging me lately. But one that will hopefully help you out in your social media endeavours. It’s about how to use hashtags properly.
I think it’s damn near impossible to go onto social media these days and not come across a hashtag. They have become such a prominent part of tech culture these days (even being added to the Oxford English Dictionary) that pretty much everybody uses them. Which is fine. But it seems like A LOT of people don’t understand how to properly use them, or what the function of them actually is. People use hashtags because… well… because everybody else does, without giving it proper thought. #StupidPeople
The hashtag is there to help you increase engagement with people with similar interests. It makes your, s and other people’s, content discoverable. It is basically a way of categoriszing content on social media.
You should choose your hashtags carefully. Be specific. Don’t go throwing them around willy-nilly or try to be clever with them. For example if you are tweeting about food, use #food or #health or #recipe. DO NOT use something like #omgsodelicious #youshouldalltrythis #iamsuchagoodcook. If people are interested in recipes for food they WILL search for #food and #recipe. So keep it simple and specific.
You should test a hashtag out before you use it. Simply search for it in the search bar and if it is widely used then great! If not, there probably isn’t much point in using it. Some people like to overuse hashtags which comes across as quite spammy and desperate. No post ever should have more hashtags than words.
That is a big no-no.
People seem to mainly do this on Instagram. It’s not uncommon to see people using up to 30 (30?!) most of which are unrelated and pointless. Spammy and desperate is not a good look. It also seems like people use the hashtags as a description of their picture and to be ironic and funny. #Butitsreallynotthatfunny … see. They aren’t there to make you look cool or funny to your followers, they’re there to help you.
Hashtags can be really useful on Social Media, allowing you to reach a wider audience and make a good impression. (Plus they really aren’t that hard of a concept to grasp!) So – I hope this helped!
Follow us on @StrategySMedia for more helpful tips on Social Media
How important is your online profile? It turns out: very.
Facebook
Just last weekend on a drunken endeavour, somebody took a picture of my group of friends in a club. We’re all generally quite unphotogenic anyway, but the one person that stood out was my friend who somehow managed to look like he was getting his ugly mug punched in the face by an invisible entity. He was cross-eyed and looked extremely pained, maybe even as if he was getting electrocuted. Everyone else found this hilarious of course, but not him. He literally snatched the phone with the picture on from my other friend’s hands and deleted it before it had chance to reach any social media platforms.
When asked about his over reaction, he did seem to have quite a valid reason, to be fair. He had recently started a new job at quite a respectable company and didn’t want to jeopardise his reputation there with a drunken picture on his Facebook profile. A year ago I would have laughed at him and told him not to be silly and that nobody cares about your Facebook and nobody’s bothered about a silly picture, but working for a recruitment company for the past 10 months has taught me that this is WRONG, and how you appear online is very important when it comes to getting hired and your reputation.
Companies use social media to do a background check on you before an interview. This makes sense, as you are far more likely to show your true colours on Facebook. Whereas on your CV or Linkedin you’re going to big yourself up as much as possible. Whilst doing some research into this I came across an article about how you should present your Facebook when looking for a job. It said you should show no links to your personal life, you shouldn’t have pictures of your children/family and your profile picture should be smart/casual. For Linkedin this is spot on, but the article was talking about Facebook for crying out loud. I thought it was a bit extreme. In my opinion as long as your profile picture isn’t of you surrounded by half naked strippers whilst you down a beer bong, you should be fine. Just be mindful of the content you are posting. Ask yourself, “If I was an employer, would this put me off employing someone?”
This applies to status updates as well. “ERRRRRR gonna get soooooo mortal later!!!!” = not appropriate.
Linkedin
Your Linkedin profile is also of vital importance when it comes to your online persona. (If you haven’t got Linkedin yet… what an earth are you playing at? Go sign up, right now.) I like to think of it as the Facebook of the business world… but without selfies and status updates about what you’re having for tea. Now obviously you’re not going to post inappropriate materiel on here (unless you’re very, very stupid and have no ambition to be successful) BUT, there are some very easy mistakes that people make without realising it or considering it a big deal. Mistakes that could potentially stop someone from hiring you, such as:
• Having incomplete information on your profile
• Having no profile picture .This just looks as if you can’t be bothered to make the profile presentable, and also – this is online NETWORKING people. You wouldn’t turn up to a networking event with a bag on your head. People want to see who they are dealing with.
• Having no contact information on there… what’s the point of even having the profile if people can’t contact you?
• Never posting a status or update… how does anybody know what you’re up to when you don’t let them know?
• Using the title of “job seeker” rather than putting your profile job title.
These are just small things but they really do affect how employers view you, so be wary of this.
Finally, we are living in a social media world. It is no longer the province of ‘the young’ – and what you put online can always be found. So – think about how you want to appear to the world, and proceed with caution!
I wonder if you, like me, think it is fairly obvious why it is a bad idea to buy your Twitter followers. Unless I’m missing something, I do not see what there is to be gained from paying for followers. Let me elaborate on why it is a good idea that you don’t buy twitter followers.
The short version: it gets you nowhere.
Don’t be under the illusion that your business will appear more successful if you have thousands of followers. If they are real followers then yes – of course.
But if you have paid for them it actually has the opposite effect. It is quite obvious they have been bought as 98% of them are fake profiles that have been made for this purpose. They normally have strange looking names, no tweets, no followers and a picture of an egg as the profile picture. If somebody checks your followers (which there is a good chance they might do, to see if you have anybody worth following) it isn’t going to create the right impression for your business and you will lose your reputation.
Purchased fans will not increase your business in any way. Even if it does gain the attention of other people who become “real” followers it will not increase the page views or engagement. What’s more important: having 10,000 followers, or having 100 that you actually engage with? Quantity over quality.
Reviews are more important than followers – as follower count alone does not quantify how successful your business is.
You could also end up spamming your real followers which can be very annoying and in turn could end up with them unfollowing you. Twitter Follower services ask to access your Twitter account to send out multiple messages advertising their way of increasing people’s followers. You will end up gaining lots of eggheads (that’s what we call the fake profiles with the pictures of eggs by the way) and losing real followers.
You’re also scamming your own business. A good analogy of this logic is that it is like cheating on a test. You will get a good grade (or lots of followers) but you will have gained no new knowledge in the long run (no new business.)
If you’re not buying them for business purposes and are doing it to look like you’re really cool and really popular then you may want to revaluate your life and maybe get out more
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