If you want additional sales reach and/or to be seen as person of influence in your market, then building a social media following is the way to go. But don’t underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes to generate the content needed to build the following of a rock star! Social media is a very fast paced environment and content goes stale very quickly. So be prepared to work at it.
You’ll need to choose your social media channels wisely, for certain types of business, energy and effort spent on LinkedIn will bring far better rewards than Facebook – this is particularly true for professional services. Trying to be all things to all people can be exhausting and probably won’t be worth the effort – so give some thought to who your ideal customer is and then think about the sort of social media they are likely to be spending their time with. As with most things digital marketing, if you don’t have the six figure budgets of the big boys, aim at small tightly focused niches – you’ll definitely get more for your effort.
Facebook, Instragram and Twitter have their own version of Google’s AdWords. LinkedIn do ‘sponsored posts’ as Pinterest who have ‘sponsored pins’. The rules of thumb that hold true for advertising using Google, also hold true for advertising on social media.
Savvy use of video and other content types (infographics, audio, webinars etc.) is essential to building you a social media following – maybe not of a rock star – but certainly of someone of influence in your market. You may even hit lucky and have a video that goes viral, but even if you don’t, engaging customers beyond the more ‘traditional’ text-based methods of email and websites has become essential to the ‘fully rounded’ digital marketing strategy.
Measuring the success of social media campaigns also brings a whole new set of things to think about. There are various tools to help you monitor not only your likes, but also if there are people out there saying things about you that you’d rather they didn’t. On the down side of social media, people are free to say pretty much what they like. We can help you manage your reputation by picking up on things before they get out of hand – and help you deal with any trolls that may be lurking.
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