How to Use Social Media Effectively in Your Business

Social media is no longer just the domain of high schoolers and hipsters posting about Sunday brunch. There over 3 billion internet users, over 2 billion of which have active social media accounts. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even Snapchat have become vital to success in the business world, particularly for start-ups and those looking to extend brand awareness beyond their core audiences.

In 2011, Hiscox commissioned a study looking at business usage of social media with responses from 305 owners, partners and senior decision makers from UK SMEs with between 1- 249 employees. They found that 57% of small businesses use social media in their marketing with the most common purpose being to increase brand awareness and boost sales. Facebook was the most popular platform with 19% using it for business related activity, compared to 14% using LinkedIn. These figures have only increased in more recent years.

Social media is mostly free and can provide businesses with valuable metrics about their customers and the ways in which they engage with specific content. In fact, social media generates a massive amount of data about your customers and their online habits in real time, every day.

Engagement

Through daily active engagement and ‘social listening’, you can gather customer data and use that information to make smarter, better informed decisions about your business. This means directly interacting with customers to find out what they’re talking about, what they want and how they use your products. Respond to tweets, ask questions and follow hashtags.

There are many tools that you can utilise to make analysing the data collected by social media platforms easier, in order to gauge customer reactions to content, tap into conversations happening around your brand, and find out what works and what doesn’t. For example, Hootsuite Insights enables users to gather together information from across all their social media platforms in real time and in one place.

Social Media Listening

Basically, social listening means actively seeking out what is being said about a company, brand, topic or person on social media channels. This could mean anything from tracking mentions of your company on Facebook to keeping track of trends in your industry that competitors are posting about on Twitter and LinkedIn.

There are many ways to engage in social listening. You could set up Google Alerts to track keywords in your industry or use Social Mention to monitor over 100 sources to measure what people are saying about you and your business. TweetReach offers basic, easy to use listening tools and ViralHeat allows you to not only listen to conversations about your brand but also to ‘identify trends to drive insights around your social media performance’.

Social media listening can massively aid in customer care – if you are actively hearing what your customers are saying, you can jump in and solve problems or just engage with your happy, satisfied customers. In the same vein, it provides direct access to feedback and can generate higher converting leads, through solving problems and highlighting your great customer service to future customers.

Targeted Advertising

Advertising on social media can be targeted towards specific demographics, promoting your business and distributing content to the people who you most want to reach. And then you can track and measure the performance of those ads in real time, allowing you to measure whether your desired audience are responding well to the copy and design.

For example, an ad campaign on Facebook can be targeted by location, age, interests, behaviours and friends among many others, making your advertising more effective. So if your company sells, for example, textbooks to university students and is based in Cambridge, you can ask Facebook to show your ads to people who are students at Cambridge University or are based in Cambridge and have expressed an interest in higher education.

Top Tips

1. Build your channels early. Start as you mean to go on – become a resource for information and a trusted communicator right from the start.

2. Find your audience. Different audiences can be found on different platforms so figure out where your target market can be found and focus on those platforms. For example, younger audiences are more likely to be found on Snapchat and Instagram, whilst older demographics tend to favour Twitter and Facebook.

3. Discover and create relationships with influencers. It’s not just what you know, but who you know.

4. Be a part of the conversation. Know what people are talking about and actively interact with them – social media is all about community and the personal touch.

More Information

How to Use Social Media to Boost Business - https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2013/aug/29/social-media-boost-business-tips

20 Social Media Marketing Tips from the Pros - http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-tips-pros/

The Top 10 Benefits of Social Media Marketing - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/11/the-top-10-benefits-of-social-media-marketing/#2f67f83d2a4d