Love it or loathe it, social media is a sales channel that is here to stay. Is this the future of shopping? An in-app, fully integrated ecosystem where content, community, and checkout fuse into a single mobile experience.
It’s already huge in China, where evenings are spent watching and shopping on social commerce and livestreaming apps.
Perhaps we’ll catch up soon in the UK too?
After all, scrolling is as much a national pastime as talking about the weather or The Traitors.
As a small business owner, you might be shooting yourself in the foot if you give it the cold shoulder. But creating sustained, engaging, creative campaigns that tie with your brand and strike a balance between sales and raising awareness is not as simple as it looks.
Just as you think of one post, source an image, edit an image, or make a video, bang, it’s time for the next one! And technology and what your customers expect are rapidly changing.
But you can still get involved and make it work for your business.
The best starting point is a clear strategy. Whether you’re a large or small operation, start-up or established business, with the right application and making time for it, or farming it out if you can’t, it can enrich your business.
Here is the Heathhall Business Centre seven-step guide to making social media work for your business…
Set clear and achievable goals
Before posting willy-nilly, and at all kinds of times, think about what you want to achieve on socials. Do you intend to boost brand awareness? Attract new customers? Target existing customers? Drive traffic to your website? Generate enquiries – phone or contact form?
It could be a wee bit of all of the above.
Once you have a defined goal, it will inform the content marketing strategy. For example, if you’re trying to attract local customers, you might try building an online community where people are encouraged to comment on posts, make suggestions and take part in polls, etc?
You can easily measure the reach of posts on the platform. A quick Google search will help you locate the tools. Likes are often vanity metrics, but post shares and their reach are where the real value lies.
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Know your audience
Build a profile of your audience, so that you know who you’re aiming at. This percolates into every aspect of your content – pictures, tone of voice, time of day you’re posting, etc.
Think about their needs and how you and your products might fulfil them. Is there any information that you have that others would find useful? We often know more than we give ourselves credit for, or wrongly assume that everybody knows what we know.
Authority is a big deal online, you see, especially if you can impart knowledge and get something back from it. You could also encourage user-generated content, where your customers send in pictures of your business and/or products.
They could choose you over a competitor if you get your socials motoring.
You can learn a lot from which posts attract the most engagement. It’s usually uplifting, entertaining ones, and ones that feature people. Repeating posts or recycling the same thing is a bit of a social media turn-off.
People can also get a wee bit carried away with the fun aspects and lose sight of the business goals.
And, you don’t need to be a catch-all. There’s no such thing, really. It’s better to appeal to the audience you want than chase all sorts of demographics and look desperate or scattered.
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Choose the right platforms
There’s a bewildering array of platforms to choose from. The more you have to manage, the earlier or later you must work so they don’t become ghost accounts when you find you don’t have the time to keep up the momentum. Posting good content to even a handful of platforms twice a week requires organisation.
Off-putting for customers of any business to see that the last post was six months ago. It might look like you’ve closed down.
Instagram is a visual content hub. Ideal for stylish photography and product shots, but people want to see people. Behind-the-scenes posts also do well. Facebook, meanwhile, is useful for local businesses and community engagement.
TikTok is short-form video, and once you get up to speed, you might find you enjoy fronting these videos. And with 1000 followers, you can also go live.
Think about the nature of your business and the best fit.
Create compelling content people want to see
A stream of sales messages or humble bragging is tedious for your customers. Yes, you need to promote your brand, but subtlety wins. There’s also an 80 per cent awareness, 20 per cent sales rule to content creation on socials.
Here are some hooks on which you might wish to hang your content:
- Helpful hints and advice – give customers a hurdle over everyday challenges.
- Behind-the-scenes content – everybody is nosy!
- Customer stories – with their permission, get testimonials out there, or film them.
- Company news – doesn’t have to be as boring as it sounds if you titivate or give it a human-interest angle.
- Promotional posts – products and services explained simply, with a clear friction-free path to purchase!
Words are important, but the visuals cut the mustard. Images must be of the highest quality possible and look attractive. Blurry, dull or rushed pictures can damage your brand’s integrity.
You need to arrest people’s attention and stop them in their scrolling tracks! Think professional and relatable. And if you give a few tips or talk about something topical, then that can work too.
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Consistent not constant
Too many posts is as bad as too few. Routine is good, with the occasional extra post if you’ve got something to say or sell that you think customers will want to hear about. Or you want to share some personal good news, like that you just ran a marathon!
Irregularity or posting at 3 am when you can’t sleep isn’t great. Maybe aim for two or three well-planned posts each week. And if you plan it in advance, you avoid repetition, and it can help you hang it off stuff like relevant awareness days, etc.
Creating several posts at once is another option, but not everybody’s brain works that way. This can also help you create more cohesive brand consistency in your posts.
Social media is designed to be conversational. That said, it’s incredibly hard to get people to comment unless you’re saying something controversial. But it’s possible.
Start with some genuine questions of your audience that could, for example, inform a new product variant or a completely new product you’re thinking about.
Reply to responses and messages as quickly as you can. A small number of regular contributors is far more valuable than thousands of passive followers.
Building relationships takes time.
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Measure your results
One of the genuine boons of social media content is that you can track performance and learn from it. Most social media platforms have analytics that lay it all out for you. Likes and shares are good, but for generating business, look to website visit spikes, too. Your blog, when you tell people a new post is live, video views, profile visits and link clicks.
Which posts performed best? What topics excite the interest of most of your customers? Did a particular format generate more enquiries? Use these insights to refine your content and make better decisions about where to invest your time.
Social media marketing is an ongoing process, so don’t be hard on yourself or get disheartened if it doesn’t work immediately. Testing different approaches and learning from the results will help you improve over time.
Good luck!
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Heathhall Business Centre is a thriving business community, and many of our tenants are active on socials. Get in touch today if you’re looking for commercial property to rent in Dumfries.
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