Five Tips to Help Your Business Craft a Dynamic Social Media Presence
Each day, your clients and potential new leads interact extensively via a wide range of diverse social media sites. Does your small business have a defined strategy to capture and maintain interest across social networking platforms? If so, could it benefit from becoming more robust, active or sophisticated? Are there any new angles you could take in order to reach an even bigger audience?
By using some or all of the following five practical tips, you may garner additional attention on social media sites, gain new leads and, potentially, expand your brand’s reach into new territory.
1. Go Beyond Facebook
Facebook is undoubtedly a powerful marketing tool for a small to medium-sized business to help gain traction in the social media domain. However, by itself, it may not be enough since an increasing number of online consumers visit multiple social media sites each day. To maintain a dynamic social media presence, and boost your business’s outreach efforts and performance, start by establishing a foothold across one or two additional diverse social networking platforms including:
- Google+
- Tumblr
2. Serve up Regular Doses of Fresh Content
Another key component of charting a path to establish a robust and dynamic social media presence involves posting high-quality, readable content and fresh status updates on a regular basis. Without fresh and engaging content, potential customers may ignore your products or services, go with a more social media-savvy competitor or opt to not follow your business online. Social media updates are also an effective forum to make clients, and potential leads, aware of upcoming sales promotions.
3. Seize Opportunities to Promote User-Generated Content
When customers post comments to your blog, post a review of your services on Yelp or “check-in” to your business on Facebook, they generate valuable content on your behalf. Leverage this user-generated content to grow your social networking presence by compiling it to build a testimonials page or share it via a status update. This technique not only generates buzz for your brand, but also helps build your credibility and reputation to garner even more potential leads.
4. Align Your Social Media Strategy with Your Marketing Differentiators
What do you want your customers to take away when they interact with your business’s social media presence? How do you educate consumers about your unique qualities? Is your business veteran-owned, do you offer unique products and services or do you routinely support charities in your local community? If so, use these marketing differentiators as part of your overall social networking marketing strategy to effectively engage with your audience.
5. Vary Content Format to Avoid Predictability
Stale content and predictability can negatively impact your social networking presence. Keep your updates fresh and entertaining by capitalizing on multiple content formats including:
- Articles of varying lengths
- Infographics
- Blogs to communicate with your audience
- Videos
- Interviews
- Press releases
- Whitepapers
- Podcasts
With a few simple strategies, you can take your social media presence from merely a placeholder on Facebook to a diverse, entertaining and informative space spread across multiple platforms.
