717 798 3495
Image Credit: HowToStartABlogOnline.net
If you’re a social media late-comer, you’ve been missing out a lot.
Social media has rapidly grown into an important channel for digital marketers, complementing and boosting their owned channels. Today’s customers are not only using social media sites to connect with and interact with their family and friends. They’re increasingly using it to follow companies and brands they like.
While visitors often do not convert directly on social media, their exposure to your social media presence ultimately influences their purchase decisions. So consider social sites as valuable touchpoints for conversion.
Identifying the best social media channels for you
Joining a social media platform may be free, but it also comes with a cost.
Maintaining and managing social media presence takes up resources. Even if you don’t hire someone for social marketing, it’s still going to take up time (either yours or one of your employee’s) and as is often the case, money for paid social ads.
To make sure you’re getting a positive ROI from your efforts, you have choose the right social media networks for your business. Your ideal social media channel is wherever your target audience is, where they’re most engaged, and where their interests are.
If you’ve been tracking your social media activities, you can easily find out which networks are the most effective for you. But if you’re just starting out, here our 6 recommended social media platforms depending on your goals:
Goal: Stay relevant and build a following from loyal customers
Facebook – Everyone is on Facebook nowadays, it’s a no-brainer that your company should be there, too. Facebook is a powerful tool not only for branding but for actually getting to know your customers and prospects.
People are already using Facebook to search for information on companies and products, get answers to their questions, and request for customer support. Having an official page on Facebook allows you to establish a consistent image and keep your brand relevant to your customers.
Twitter – It doesn’t matter if you’re in retail or B2B; Twitter is another extremely popular networking site you should be on. Just like Facebook, Twitter is highly useful for interacting with your customers and driving prospects back to your website.
Short updates about products, links to helpful content, and answering customer queries are just some of the ways successful businesses are using Twitter for marketing.
Goal: Create networks for business opportunities
LinkedIn – LinkedIn is geared specifically for business networking. Unlike Facebook and Twitter which is largely used for personal reasons, LinkedIn is all about making professional business connections. So if you’re a B2B company and you can’t find an audience for your products or services on Facebook, you should focus on LinkedIn.
What’s great about LinkedIn is that, since it was created to be used for business, it has built-in tools for finding the people you want to connect with quickly and easily. For instance, LinkedIn allows you to search for professionals by industry, job title, or even company. You can also join groups in your niche or start one of your own to learn more about industry trends or get information on the needs of your prospects.
Goal: Engage with visual interest and helpful content
YouTube – The second largest Google-owned search engine, YouTube (YT) is synonymous with web video. If you have video content or plan on producing it, this should be on top of your list.
YT is a powerful tool for showing product hacks, tutorials, tips, and other learning resources such as webinars. The key is to produce relatively short but high-quality videos.
Instagram – Instagram allows you to take advantage of the camera on mobile devices to capture and directly post images and 15-second videos. You can also link your Instagram account to automatically send your images to Facebook and Twitter.
Keep your posts relevant to your brand and balance fun photos with business ones to build and engage your followers on Instagram.
Pinterest – Although Pinterest is image-driven just like Instagram, it’s used in a completely different manner by users. On Pinterest, you can organize images into pin boards based on subject or themes. Users can then save or re-pin your images into their own boards.
The secret to success with Pinterest is posting high-quality images and pinning them into inspiration boards for users. Pinterest also lets you directly put links on images so you can send traffic back to your site.
Building A Social Company
So you see, you don’t have to be on all social media platforms. You just have to be on the ones that actually make sense for your business. To be successful at social media marketing, you need to understand how each network is used by your audience to engage with your business. Plan your content accordingly and track the performance of your efforts to maximize your social presence for growing your business.
Conversion Conference is evolving into Digital Growth Unleashed! After dozens of shows in the US and Europe since 2010, we are defining a new and more powerful perspective for digital persuasion. Create the most compelling end-to-end customer experiences. Attract, persuade, serve, and the technology to make it happen – we’ve got you covered with four parallel breakout tracks! Plan early and get the absolute lowest rates possible for May 16-17, 2018 at the Mandalay Bay Casino & Resort, Las Vegas.
