We live in the age of social media everything. New platforms appear overnight and take the world by storm. Business owners, no matter their field, are kept on their toes when it comes to keeping up with modern consumers. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and a host of other apps are where businesses need to be if they are trying to compete with a tech-savvy consumer base. We asked entrepreneurs and business owners about how they use social media for business and their replies are listed below. These tips might even help you find the right footing on social media for your business.
#1-Two purposes
Social Media is crucial for our business. We have grown from 0 to over 20,000 users where a lot of our users came from a reference from someone who mentioned us on their social media channel. We use social media primarily for two purposes 1) To keep our followers informed on new features and updates and 2) To engage with our users and help them resolve issues Having a consistent presence on Social Media helps our users know that we are there for them whenever they need us. They do not need to figure out how to reach out to our support team, as they already know how to Tweet or leave a comment on Facebook. This is such a valuable channel for us to connect with our users. We also participate in online community chats that take place regularly. These chats are a great way to expose our tools to highly targeted users. I cannot think of a paid strategy that is as intimate as an online chat with a large number of potential customers.
Thanks to Dinesh Agarwal, RecurPost Inc.!
#2- Connect and drive traffic
I primarily use Pinterest and Twitter for my business, but I use them for different purposes. Twitter has never been very effective for me in terms of driving traffic and new visitors to my site, but it's great for connecting with others in my industry and building my network. Pinterest is the opposite. I use Pinterest to attract new visitors to my site by promoting my blog posts on Pinterest, and it's helped to grow the audience of my blog. I'm active on both platforms every day.
Thanks to Marc Andre, Vital Dollar!
#3-Inbound lead gen
When you repeat good things again and again, great things happen. That's why I use a quick and easy social media strategy to make sure my brand and inbound lead gen–my reasons for using social in the first place–are continually humming. What is it? CPR: Create. Publish. Repeat. 1.) Create content with intention. 2.) Publish that content. 3.) Repeat the process. I'm most active on LinkedIn, but this strategy works everywhere.
Thanks to Zach Messler
#4- Retargeting
Social Media is a huge part of our marketing. We use Facebook retargeting for anyone that comes to our website. We also retarget all of our direct mail list to Facebook. We publish both written and video blog posts at least two times a week. Of course these are shared with all of our social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. In this era of electronic media if you are not taking advantage of social media you are going to be at the back of the pack in marketing. The sweet thing about social media is most of it is free. Just a little time and effort to take advantage of it.
Thanks to Don Wede, Heartland Funding Inc.!
#5- Networking and connecting with new customers
I could not have grown my business the way I have over the past 2 years without social media, but it is all about knowing how to use each platform. For networking Twitter and Instagram have been instrumental, allowing me to directly contact people that before I couldn't get to without their management or publicists. Facebook has been amazing at connecting me with new customers for the programs I have created. There they get to see the work I do, engage with me and easily see the engagement I get from my audience. In 2019 I expect to dig in more, doing more with video on all platforms. That seems to be a great way of personalizing content and sharing a call to action.
Thanks to Cyrus Webb, Conversations Media Group!
#6- Maintain a favorable image of my clients
Social media is one of the powerful tools used today to grow your business. As a public relations professional, it is my job to establish and maintain a favorable image of my clients to the general public. Social media platforms allow me to communicate all of the great things that my clients are doing to effectively sculpt the image and perception of these businesses and business owners. There are so many choices in platforms, each business and client can choose which best suits their goals. Once that is decided, we can expand the brand and increase our reach to bring in more clients that believe in this company. The rule of 7 states that takes 7 touches of a combination of hearing, seeing, reading or talking about a company or promotion before it's internalized or acted upon. Social media is the clear, best option to getting each client or potential customer to that number. Repurposing original content gets a person closer to making that purchase or referring that business.
Thanks to Tonya McKenzie, Sand & Shores PR!
#7- A number of ways
Expanding into social media has allowed my recruiting firm to be much more creative. We are no longer confined to the typically boring, word-heavy job sites. LinkedIn is, of course, a great site for us, but Facebook and Twitter are the sites where we can really explore innovative ways to source and communicate with candidates. We leverage the sites to post videos that provide candidates with a sneak peek into a typical day of open job positions or what it's like to work with our clients. Additionally, communications with candidates have improved over social media. When we post videos, blogs, or job descriptions, candidates can ask clarifying questions to which we can quickly respond. Social media has really opened up a whole new way for us to better conduct our business.
Thanks to Matt Dodgson, Market Recruitment!
#8-SEO
The way I leverage social media for myself and my SEO clients is to create a system using IFTTT and their site's RSS feed to automatically post to their social media accounts everytime they blog. We set up the system to pass maximum SEO value by making the social signals to be easily found by Google. It's a great way to not have to automate social media posting especially when entrepreneurs get overwhelmed with wearing a lot of hats.
Thanks to Joe Babi, Joseph Paul Digital Agency!
#9-Share everything
Blu Skin Care uses social media to share everything from photos to important company updates. With a business account, we have access to powerful advertising tools and in-depth analytics. Business pages also have a lot of customization options, allowing us to highlight information such as our contact information, hours of operation and the products we offer.
Thanks to Zondra Wilson, Blu Skin Care!
#10- Brand awareness and engagement
Social media today is what radio and television were at their zenith. Anyone with a keyboard and WiFi connection has the opportunity to run and market a successful business. By tapping into Facebook and Instagram advertising platforms, we utilize these social media channels to spread our brand awareness and engage with new and existing audiences. The greatest thing about utilizing social media marketing is we are able to efficiently spend our digital ad budget by specifically targeting those who we think are most likely to interact with us or find our services useful. This creates efficiency while also allowing us to look at the analytics and see what other opportunities exist when marketing ourselves across social media.
Thanks to Kyle Plesa, The Social Group™!
#11- Drive traffic
We have grown our entire business via social media. In the last 5 years, we have worked with multiple influencers which have helped grow awareness in our industry. The main model we have had success with is driving traffic to our website via influencers then re-targeting them with ads on Instagram and Facebook to drive them into sales funnels. It's important to remember it can take multiple points of contact to turn someone into a customer.
Thanks to Mike Kolb, Xwerks!
#12- Two main things
We use social media for 2 main things. 1. Get our leads. We receive over 200 leads per studio per month. And 2. We use it to get new employees as well. It allows us to really show the future employees what it's like to work at 4U Fitness. This allows us to get more qualified leads that meet our culture.
Thanks to Daniel Nyiri, 4u-fitness.com!
#13- Engagement
One of the things that always helped us stand out of the rest is being truly original and make social media posts that say something. In social media marketing, you can’t just post a stock photo and a generic text; we’re not in 2012 anymore. People want to know you in a much deeper level. They want to see your face and your employee’s, the place your work at, even what you’re eating today! So why not show it? It’s good to mix those posts with any other more “traditional” postings like the announcement of a new product or promo. Live video is also an important tool to engage people; we’ve participated in many expos and workshops in 2018 and using YouTube and Facebook Live has given us excellent results when it comes to engaging new and even existing clients.
Thanks to Danny Star, Websites Depot!
#14- Increase our presence and credibility across the web
Using social media for business announcements or current business activities allows us to share what we are doing with the public more quickly, we can show a personal side to our business and see what people are responding to. We post business announcements to social media platforms to give our followers the most current information like our available properties for sale. Business announcements also allow us to touch our followers over and over. The more we touch our followers or potential customers the more likely they will remember us when they need our services. We also post personal things to social media to become more real and relatable to our social media community. We are ultimately in the people business and posting personal activities helps us create a local bond to our followers and potential customers. We can also track the information we post to gain insight on what people are responding to which allows us to be more targeted in our posts to get a related response. We want to build brand awareness so the more eyeballs we get on our social media platforms the better chance we have at getting people to our website.
Thanks to Adam Mitchell, We Buy Houses Fast in Dallas!
#15- Interact and answer relevant queries
I use social media to interact with my company, SimScale’s, online community. Rather than only using popular social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) to post about our firm’s latest ongoings, we find interacting and engaging with customers best practice in building and maintaining a credible presence. This includes taking an active role on channels such as Reddit and Quora to answer relevant queries with our expertise, along with joining Facebook and LinkedIn groups to join the latest conversations. In turn, this increases our website conversion rate from these social channels that can be seen and tracked on Google Analytics. Social media should be used by businesses to not only spread news, but to engage with their audience in a meaningful way.
Thanks to Megan Jenkins, SimScale!
How do you use social media for business? Tell us in the comments below. Don’t forget to join our #IamCEO Community.