Reaching hundreds of millions of people with limited overheads, a well-considered social media campaign can become a cornerstone of a successful marketing push for small businesses and start-ups. Offering tighter control over brand image, a social media campaign must be developed intelligently to produce beneficial results for a small business. Here we offer a few tips for small businesses attempting to optimise their social media, and demonstrate examples of small businesses getting social media right, and some getting it not so right.
Develop Personality
Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook provide a setting for brands to interact directly with their customers. Interacting with warmth, humour and personality can help develop a stronger bond between business and customer. Small businesses tend to have a more fixed, definitive customer base, making it easier to develop a personality which is attractive to the target audience. Respond directly to enquiries from customers, using their name, to help them feel valued and help develop loyalty.
Toilet paper brand, Charmin, has developed a huge following thanks to the playful toilet humour of its social media campaign.
Utilise Different Mediums
If you have a message or sentiment you want to share with you audience, select the social media platform and medium which will allow you to share it most elegantly and effectively. A six second video on Vine may be more effect than a 200 word press release on Facebook for revealing a new product and all its features.
Printer specialists PrinterLand run competitions through their social media platforms – choosing the perfect platform for the task. Question and answer competitions are ran through Facebook, whilst photo caption competitions will be hosted on Twitter.
Measure your Success
When implementing new social media strategies, it is important to measure the impact these strategies have across the various social media platforms. Using tools such as Social Bro and Klout, you are able to determine how many people saw your activity and have interacted with it. Successful strategies can be singled out to help influence future activity.
Be Regular but Relevant
Some social media campaign managers find it difficult to remain in the limelight and attention of their audience without producing content too frequently. Overkill content can irritate the audience and lead to unsubscribes and/or unfollows. Scheduling posts and content uploads via tools such as Tweetdeck can help you better control the frequency of your activity.
Be Useful
Whilst some completely useless social media accounts (Boring James Milner) prove to be huge successes with a large, devoted following – branded accounts should be relevant and useful. Providing extra value, information and answers for your audience can make your social media accounts the ‘must-visit’ sources for all concerns relating to your business or even your industry.
Throughout all social media activity, it is important to remain true to your personal and your company’s ethics and standards. This helps ensure all work is carried out to a requisite standard.