by Keval Padia | How to grow your business using social media | Social media has been god-sent for public relations and marketing owing to the fact that it connects easily with the audience. People consume media, through these social media channels and even communicate with each other through the medium. Nearly every individual in the US is present on Facebook while all the media professionals are on Twitter. But the popularity is in no way a clear picture of the utility of social media for your business growth.
Most people who advise you to implement social media for your business is wrong. One can look at different ways to leverage social media for your business. Here are some ways:
1. Focus primarily on organic touchpoints
There are many things available on social media. But here’s something that is surprising. According to research reports, most people don’t use social media for your brand messaging or a dialogue about brands. They engage with a brand on social media for customer care and to avail discounts.
- Customer perception affects brands and some clients are finicky enough to demand a response within some time.
- The actual response time will eliminate goodwill very quickly. Customers persuaded through incentives and discounts expect more discounts, deals and incentives in the long run.
- One needs to create different engagement approaches with social followers from time to time.
- Some users have personal reasons to engage with brands on social media. Some sites boost interpersonal engagement but brand engagements are concerned primarily with customer service intent.
2. Convert social users to email subscribers
Facebook posts travel from sender to their Facebook profile page which is displayed to part of the friend network while ignored by recipients without any action.
Email is in this context becomes a more reliable means to communicate with different types of people. Emails are more effective than social media to communicate points of view and opinions to people.
Email subscribers need to enter their email id and their information before confirming their subscription. But in the context of a behavioural standpoint, odds for social acquisition are greater than email subscribership.
However, one can leverage the attention of people garnered through social media to make them email subscribers. Do have a special offer conveyed through tweets for them meant for email subscribers thus rendering value to email subscribers.
3. Assessment of Budget for social media reach
Many PR folks think that paying for social reach is not acceptable since marketing has been traditionally associated with ad buying and placements. Social media promotions though come under the purview of PR and developing an organic reach is not enough for reaching the entire social audience.
For helping in the growth of your business, social media needs to have a budget for reach and pay-to-play is the way forward in different scenarios.
4. Personalize your outreach
Most people are on Facebook, professionals prefer LinkedIn, while 20% of the social people use Twitter. Instagram is now becoming a popular option for businesses, as they are able to share photographs and videos to possible clients, by using their “profile” to draw people in. Having a large amount of Instagram followers (either grown organically or gained using a website like Growthoid) is seen to have a positive impact on a business, which is why it is one of the most popular forms of social media at this time.
There are automated tools within the PR profession that helps businesses to send in blast emails especially to influencers and the broad audience. Effective pitches are usually personal and insight can be made to align with businesses. Segmentation is highly powerful to many marketers.
Most people see their social profiles as an extension of their interests and lives and hence it makes a lot of sense to know more about the people that can make the right impact to your business growth.
5. Don’t overthink when expecting from social media
Many people offer points of view that do not offer any solution for your business verticals. Every act on social media needs to have a definite purpose and responsibilities and there should be a process in place to measure the effectiveness of the tactics based on business needs and objectives
Social media should have a positive outcome and one should have a team to execute the planned tactics on different channels on a regular basis. The team should also engineer metrics to measure the effectiveness of their strategy and then use tools for referral codes too to detect the original source.
A lot of people like to use a lot of jargon for social media marketing but not many are pragmatic enough to think about what they intend to accomplish.
6. Be social on social media
Though this is pretty straightforward, one forgets that social media is meant for being social with people. People forget to engage or share something based on interests especially when a business is involved. People use social networks to remain connected with people and this is different from the business’s intention with social media.
To align with social media implies using the audience for effective interactions rather than being a one-way conversationalist.
Conclusion
Social media is special for many businesses and there is very little information on making strategies work. But pragmatically speaking, it is essential to leverage social media as an effective tool after one understands its capabilities completely. Also, social media can never work as an isolated means for driving business growth but needs to be an integral part of the overall marketing strategy.
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Author Bio
Keval Padia is the Founder & CEO of Nimblechapps. Being an avid gamer himself, he has converted many game ideas into reality. He is an Android Game Developer, with acute knowledge of mobile game design and user experience design.
