Getting Started with Social Media

Finding new customers is a challenge and no matter how hard you work or how great your product, if you do not have customers or you do not know how to find new customers your business is going to struggle.

Finding customers the way you always have has become increasingly difficult, you are active on social media but you aren’t really seeing the business benefits and you just cannot seem to keep up, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and the new thing popping up every day, it all just seems to complicated.  

Well I am here to tell you that it does not have to be so difficult. Social Media can change your business. The Key to success on social media is much simpler than you think. So, let’s break it down.

Know Your Customer

First and most the important thing is knowing your customer and knowing which platforms they are active on. Do you know what they like? Do you know what scares them? Do you know what they think about your product or what frustrates them? This will all help inform your decision making and if you are making a decision without asking how it will affect your customers, you are making a mistake.

Understand the Social Platform

Now that you know your customers, it is time to understand the benefits and the drawbacks of each of the social platforms that you are considering or that you are currently active on.

Here is what you need to know:

Let’s start with Facebook.

Facebook is the largest platform available and provides businesses with high click through rates (CTR) and to target customers on site and off site. When you are using Facebook, you have access to powerful targeting tools and 1.6 Billion daily users. The downside to Facebook is that it uses what are known as “Filtered Feeds”. This means that even though someone follows you they still might not see your content because Facebook curates their user feeds.

Twitter on the other hand has a much smaller audience but provides great opportunities to reach out to media personalities and influencers. Twitter also uses a “Pure Feed”, meaning that if someone follows you your post will appear in their feed, giving you full organic reach. Twitter however is much smaller than Facebook only having 134 million daily active users.

LinkedIn is a platform that allows users to share more career focused content. This gives companies access to a very targeted audience. LinkedIn also uses a pure feed providing a large organic reach but is again a much smaller platform than Facebook.

Instagram is another platform with a big audience with almost 600 million daily active users. Instagram is a highly visual platform and you should only consider this if you are comfortable and able to produce visual content regularly. A downside to Instagram is that you cannot post links in organic posts and you will have to spend money to be able to link to an of site location.

Finally, we will look at YouTube. YouTube like Facebook and Instagram has a massive potential reach with great targeting tools. YouTube however is very time-consuming, and it is difficult to grow your channel.  YouTube is also a less interactive platform than the others mentioned.

Select 2 Social media platforms

Once you know your customer and you understand the platforms, you need to remember that you do not have to be active on every platform out there. This is a mistake many companies make, yes there are a lot of great platforms out there, but the companies that are able to successfully operate on all of these platforms have large social teams that run each platform. For a small business the best thing to do is to look at the social platforms that your customers are active on, the platforms you enjoy using and the platforms you are comfortable using and select no more than two. Once you are comfortable and you have developed processes to benefit from these platforms you can start looking at adding a third or fourth platform.

Create a Content Plan and Be Consistent

Now that you have decided which platforms you will focus on the next step is to plan your content. When you are posting, whenever you have the time, your profile becomes inconsistent and you will struggle to grow. A great approach, is to use a content calendar and plan your posts for the month ahead, taking into account public holidays or events that you could create content around, this can usually be done in a couple of hours and will give you more time to focus on other important things. You do not have to overdo it 2-3 posts per week are more than enough to help you grow.

Have Fun and be Social

Lastly, have fun, be creative, be social and be yourself. Many people get to caught up in posting regularly that they do not get involved with their customers and they do not enjoy the interaction. Social Media is a great place to meet new customers, start great business and personal relationships and grow your business, but only if you are willing and able to talk to all these potential customers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, do not over complicate things, when you want to be successful at anything the best way to do it is to start and take it one step at a time. Just keep things simple, know who your customers are and what social media platforms they are using, understand what each platform offers, select one or two to start with, plan your content, be consistent and most of all have fun and be social, it is called social media after all.