Whether you’ve just started your company or you’re just starting social media for your company, there are some important things to consider when putting a strategy together. You already know that social media can help grow your audience and develop relationships with current and potential customers – so it’s important to make sure you are saying the right things at the right times – here are some tips to get you started.
- Start small. You don’t need to be on every channel to begin with, start with 2 platforms that are popular with your target audience. Facebook is likely going to be one of them – here are some facts to help you choose:
- Facebook is still the most popular social media platform with over 1.59 billion users from all age demographics, but the largest bracket is young females (77%) between the ages of 18-29. Users spend the most time on Facebook (compared to other channels) and about half of them like a brand or business page making it an effective tool for small business owners looking to build a following.
- Twitter has over 750 million users and is a great platform for reaching new customers that you may not have been able to reach otherwise. The largest demographic is 18-29 and is split pretty evenly between males and females. A lot of businesses are using twitter as a social, customer service platform because the channel makes it easy to interact with your followers, answer questions and resolve complaints.
- Instagram is an online mobile photo and video sharing platform with over 300 million users sharing more than 60 million photos each day. More than 50% of users are age 18-29 and it is most successful among businesses that have highly visual content to share.
- Pinterest allows users to search for visual content including recipes, fashion, crafts and do-it-yourself projects. It is a good platform for pushing users to a business website or blog and is most popular among young women.
- Snapchat is an image and video messaging mobile application with over 100 million users. Launched in 2011, it is most popular among young people under the age of 25. 70% of users are females making less than $50,000 per year. This platform would be best used for storytelling or sharing exclusive content.
- Once you’ve decided which platforms you are going to start with – the next thing to think about is content. It helps to apply the 80/20 rule – you only want to be selling your products or services 20% of the time, 80% of your content should be focused on developing relationships and trust with your audience. Offering advice and tips is a great way to do this. Keep in mind that you have different types of audience members. Some may know you while others may not, some may be new to your category – develop posts and content that will appeal to each of them.
- It’s easy to get overwhelmed with social media when you start out, so developing a schedule is a good way to keep yourself organized and your audience engaged. There is nothing worse than going to a company’s social site and seeing their last post is a few months old, or worse – older. There are a lot of tools available to help you schedule posts ahead of time, but remember that social media should be timely as well. Have your regular posts ready to go – but also make time to share and comment on trending topics.
If you have in-house staff to help you roll out your social plan, start by developing a strategy and then use a calendar to plan out your actual posts. Need help getting started? Contact us.