All business users of Social Media are always looking for ways in which to improve the way they use each platform and how they can better results such as direct enquiries and web traffic. Here are ten top tips to help you gain better results from your efforts:
- Make sure you have a complete profile to include image and contact details. Spend time to make sure your profile looks professional as in most situations people will be seeing this part of your Social Media presence first. Make sure your profile is consistent across each Social Media platform.
- Once you have created your accounts on Social Media make sure they are shared across your website, email signature, newsletter and any other on and off line marketing material you have.
- Make sure you trial more than one Social Media platform which will help you to increase the network you are able to reach.
- If you are going to be using Social Media it is important to be active and share content at least daily otherwise other users will assume you are a random user and will be less likely to follow your profile. Accounts that are seen to be active with updates and posts throughout the day are far more likely to embrace larger networks and see better results from Social Media.
- As well as being active on Social Media you also need to study what Social Media is all about – Being Social! You should look to engage with people by using features such as reTweeting, commenting, quoting, liking and engaging in conversations by praising, questioning and debating.
- We always say that blogs are a great tool to increase web traffic from Social Media. Make sure you share not only blogs from external websites that you find interesting, but blogs of your own from your own website as they are far more likely to be shared across Social Media platforms and build your web traffic. Very good blogs can even go viral on Social Media.
- Create not only profiles for your business, but think about personal profiles too. Depending on the size of your company, so people will engage not only with the brands profile on Social Media, but would also be interested in following the CEO, Marketing Director etc. Make your company approachable and each team member could benefit from having a Social Media account such as technical support, web support etc.
- Think about creating and building groups within Social Media. You can not only create profiles, but the likes of Facebook and Linkedin allow for creating specific groups and pages, for instance if you are a marketing supplier to the Estate Agency industry then think about creating groups such as ‘Successful Marketing Techniques for Estate Agents UK’.
- Think about your target audience. How do they interact and importantly when do they use Social Media. There is no point in sharing content on Social Media at times of day or days of the week that your target audience are not active. Especially for platforms such as Twitter, it is important to understand when your target audience is active and when you updates are more likely to be seen.
- Think about using images and videos within your Social Media updates. It is proved that updates containing images gain better results that simple text or click through updates. A video in a post will also engage people and tempt them to click through, especially if the content is relevant to their interests.