Using social media for business is as much part of your everyday life as is, well, using social media for pleasure. But the recent news in the UK that Weatherspoons has thrown in the towel on the whole business, may raise a few questions for business? Is it actually worth the time? Does it increase your business or does it distract you from it? How can you tell?
Here are my top tips for effective social media
- Do you have a social media strategy and plan? If you don’t how can you measure if you are successfully converting a “like” into a conversation and from there, a sale
- Is your team involved? Of course they are. But are they really? Have you explained to them your social media strategy and asked them to use their personal networks to push the business and use them in a manner that will help the company? If not, why
- Are you on the right platforms? You may have a strong presence on Facebook that doesn’t appear to get you anywhere. Should you try some other places? Is twitter any use for anything other than complaining and finding out if roads are closed? If snapchat lost billions in value when Kylie Jenner said she didn’t use it anymore, is it really the platform you need to be on? For small businesses in particular, limit your platforms to where your target audience can be found most easily and use a tool like Hootsuite to manage your calendar.
- Is your content relevant?
- Your content must interest your audience. It needs to be attention-grabbing and you must understand your audience.
- It needs to meet the objectives of your plan (so you need a plan)
- It has to say something about you. Pictures or video of your product in production, on load out, in use or being produced are always useful for your clients. They reassure on quality (be careful everyone has their PPE on when the photographer turns up), they reassure on desirability of product and will elicit shares.
Spend ten minutes today looking through your social media feeds, and have a long hard think about what you want to achieve from social media.
