How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business
Whether you do it well or poorly, establishing platforms on social media can take a lot of valuable time. Many companies that appear quite active and engaged on social media aren’t seeing any of that effort translate to increasing their bottom line.
But you would never know the difference between a company with profit-producing social media engagement and a company that is just very vocal online. In this post, learn concrete steps to take to make sure the time you spend on social media is actually helping to grow your business.
When You Re-Share Content, Tag the Influencer
The key to growing your business is expanding your reach. Not only that, but you want to expand your reach in the right ways and to the right people.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to identify influencers in your industry. Influencers are posters that have a lot of active followers.
Then, become a part of their community. Strive to become recognizable. Start sharing their content. And when you share a piece of content they have posted, be sure to tag them. This is critical because when you tag them, the post will show up on your social feed AND theirs, so all of their followers will see it as well.
Invite Influencers to Guest Post on Your Feeds
Some of the most popular social feeds today dedicate days or even whole weeks to guest posters. These influencers literally “take over” the feed to generate their own unique content that reaches both your audience and theirs.
This is a softer way to become more visible to influencers’ own followers, since the influencer will be keen to promote their guest spot on your feed as well, especially when you allow them to use their guest time to promote a new product or special event they have coming up.
Install an Effective Social Analytics Tool
It does you no good to become a recognized brand name if no one who recognizes you buys your products. What you need to do is become a recognized brand name with the folks who want and need what you have to sell.
The only real way to tell whether you are moving closer to or farther away from that goal is to analyze the performance of your social feeds over a period of time.
With a good analytics tool in place, you can learn a great deal about your followers and guests. In fact, you may initially feel overwhelmed by the amount of big data business intelligence you can glean just from studying social feed interactions with your followers!
For instance, you can learn what days and times are best for posting your content by evaluating which posts get the most traffic and responses.
You can test different types of content (for example, videos, infographics, blog posts, and photos) to find out what format works best to deliver information to your followers.
You can also see who consistently re-shares your content or responds to your posts and begin the process of converting these people from a fan into a customer.
Become a Skilled Social Listener
Finally, it does your company no good if you are being mentioned but you don’t know it. Monitoring social media for mentions of your company is called “social listening.”
You can set up searches to detect when business keywords are mentioned. Then you can join in the conversation to share information or even reward the sharer with swag, coupons, or free publicity.
Social media may seem vast, anonymous, and impersonal, but in truth, it is nothing more than a worldwide conversation between individuals or small groups. In this way, cultivating relationships (and making sales) on social media takes every bit as much finesse, sensitivity, mutuality, and generosity as in-person relationships require. Remembering this will help you make the most of your social media connections.
