Best Social Media for Business has transformed from a way to connect with marketing experts, friends, and family online to a comprehensive source of news and information.
Cultivating a social media experience can be difficult for individuals — but for businesses, it presents a whole different set of challenges Create engaging, meaningful content.
You can be doing every other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practice just right, you can have unique meta descriptions, perfectly formulated headlines, and well-used, top-ranking keywords but if the body of your content isn’t relevant to your audience, none of those matters.
Your words should be well thought out and well-researched. Your audience needs to know they can trust you. Pique their interest. Give them a reason to be curious. Show them your product or service has more value to them than a sneaky scammer. Your words should also resonate with your reader and entice them to take action. After reading your piece, you want your audience to not only remember it but share it with their friends. It needs to be better than good.
It needs to be memorable.
Address their concerns and answer their questions. Listen to their pain points and help alleviate them. If it’s the thrills they’re seeking, thrill them!
The bottom line, figure out what they want, and be the one to give it to them.
Envisioning your online strategy
Odds are you have envisioned your future.
You’ve thought about what color house you want if your next vehicle should be practical or not, what kind of a grandparent you hope to be, and all that jazz. But have you taken the time to envision your company’s future like that?
What impression do you want your website to leave on your audience? How do you want your brand to be regarded by potential customers? Do you see your company as an informative Instagram presence or a witty Twitter voice?
This is the best place to start, whether you’re recreating your online marketing strategy from scratch or deconstructing things to build an updated image. Brainstorm, document, and transform your content marketing strategy into something bold and effective. These steps will help you along the way.
YouTube – Creating How-To Video
YouTube is one of the top social media sites and is the number one video-sharing platform in the world, which makes it the perfect place to share videos for advertising. It’s the ideal site for B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) companies to target their audience with the different types of video ads shown below.
View Video Ads: Skippable advertisements that you only pay for when viewers watch or interact with your video. In-Stream Ads: Are played before, during, or after other YouTube videos. Discovery Ads: These are displayed as a thumbnail and can promote your content in different locations of discovery (YouTube’s mobile homepage, search results, or next to related videos). Bumper Ads: Unskippable videos up to six seconds long that play before, during, or after a user watches a video.
Youtube represents a huge opportunity for marketers looking for multi-media ad formats – in fact, it’s inarguably dominant in this area. For video ads Youtube is undoubtedly the best social media site – but this style of advertising might not translate well for companies already focusing on other styles of text ads.
As much as 80% of shoppers who watch a Youtube video related to a purchase they are planning to make claim they watch it at the beginning of their shopping process. This means that this platform represents an opportunity for catching shoppers at the beginning of the shopping funnel.
Crazy YouTube Stat: “YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds and above more than any cable network in the U.S. and across the globe” People are watching YouTube. You are an expert in your field. Make a video that solves a common problem that most of your customers have. If you sell products, make sure people know how to correctly use them. Or if you find that there is a common problem that people are having with a product, help them by posting a video of how to quickly fix the problem. This could save you a ton of time and be a great resource for your customers.
Facebook is among the most widely used social media platforms in the world. It’s also the future as the most popular site for marketers with close to 80% of all businesses using Facebook in some way.
The Facebook business page is crucial to create for commercials or brands – as one of the largest social media platforms it offers important marketing and advertising opportunities for all kinds of businesses. It also functions as a great platform for inbound marketing with content that helps increase brand visibility.
Why? Because everyone is there! The odds are your audience (when they are active online greater percentage are using FB) is on Facebook. Don’t be underate Facebook just for posts (Yes! That’s a great way to promote your products, sales, services, etc.). It can host contests and promotions. Facebook for your small business has apps you can integrate, CTAs (call-to-action buttons), targeted reach, analytics, and much more. It may cost a little investment (in time and cash) but it still has the power to reach your intended audience.
Twitter is an immensely popular social media network that is incredibly fast-paced. Famously known for limiting tweets to 280 characters, this is a platform where every word counts. It’s still a top social media site in 2020 and one that provides an opportunity for marketers to quickly grab their audience’s attention and give them a link to the information they need and the products they want.
The following types of ads are offered on Twitter:
- Promoted Tweets: Ads that look like regular tweets but allow you to share content with users who don’t follow you.
- Promoted Accounts: Also known as a Follower Campaign, this type of ad promotes your Twitter account to encourage people to follow you if they have shown interest in content similar to yours.
- Promoted Trends: Ads that display at the first or second lots of the “Trends for you” section of a user’s timeline and the “Explore” tab.
Twitter offers an opportunity for both a content presence that leads to inbound traffic and a paid advertising presence for disruptive traffic. Since Twitter is one of the older, larger social media sites it represents a good opportunity, but it hasn’t grown into the marketing giants that Facebook and Google have. However, since 2019 Twitter’s site referral traffic has increased by 6%, meaning that its popularity for marketers may be rising.
Pinterest – Keep Your Boards Well Organized
Pinterest is different than your small business’s Facebook page, where a hodgepodge of information is posted in chronological order, rather than in order of importance or by topic. By allowing you to create multiple boards—one for each category of your products or services, for example—Pinterest helps keep users engaged not only in your general content but in content that’s specific to their interests. Pinterest users are pulling up the app in-store to guide their purchases, so make it easy for them!
Post Pics of Your Customers Using Your Product
Make a contest where people participate. You can create a hashtag (e.g. #onthebeach) where people would take pictures of themselves using your product at the beach – they can even tag themselves or others. You could give away free prizes, merchandise, or a percentage off to those who “won” or even to all who participated.
LinkedIn Pulse is their blogging arena. If your business writes a blog, it is worth the time to put it onto LinkedIn Pulse. It allows people and businesses to post their blogs and reach their market through tags and keywords.
LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry, or with similar interests, to share content, find answers, post, and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts.
Build a presence for your business on LinkedIn by creating your Company Page, attracting followers, and posting company updates to drive engagement.
Lastly, off your company page, you can create a Showcase Page. Showcase Pages are niche pages connected to the company page. They allow a company to promote specific products or markets to a specific buyer persona. LinkedIn users can follow singular Showcase Pages without following the business or their other Showcase Pages. This allows businesses to promote for and cater to the audience specific to the page. In other words, if you have a pet boutique, your dog-lover customers won’t be subjected to reading your blog post on the new tank-cleaning spray for iguanas. With Showcase Pages, marketers can create hassle-free content that’s personalized to the audience they’re selling to.
Figure Out Your Best Social Media Marketing Path
As you can see, there are many options available for businesses to advertise on social media. Even if you don’t decide to invest in paid advertising immediately, it’s highly beneficial for businesses to create social media platforms to market their products and services to potential customers. Keep in mind, that it’s often best to focus on a few social media sites that are most widely used by your target audience rather than try to have a presence on every possible platform.
We encourage you to create accounts on a few and see which social media sites are best for marketing your way and that is enjoyable to use.
Contact us for more information about paid media marketing resources and strategies – our team can give you a free site consultation.