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Most small businesses rely heavily on social media for cost-friendly advertising, and if you aren’t already using your channels to the maximum extent, you’re definitely missing a trick. Your channels should play a strong role in your overall marketing strategy – as a way to form customer relationships, gather informal feedback through social listening, test new ideas out, take care of customer service issues and share what your business is all about with the wider world. We can put a lot of effort into developing content for these channels, which is a great idea- except if no one sees it! If you don’t have many followers and you aren’t seeing a steady upward trend, then your social media channels need a serious rethink. It can feel harder than ever to cut through the chatter and create an impact, but with all the millions of people trafficking these channels, there is certainly room for you to carve out a niche and make yourself heard.
Take A Look At Your Site
It may not have occurred to you to examine the link between your website and your social channels, but internally is the first place you should look. Many companies don’t have clear social media icons linked to all their different channels on their site, and if you haven’t thought about this before you could be missing an easy win. Use your site analytics to work out the areas of your website which generate the most traffic, and consider layering in a tool like Hotjar which tracks eye movement on the site and will show you the most ‘seen’ areas of your site – experiment with locating social icons here so people can clearly see you’re on various platforms. When you follow up a client referral or make a sale, send an email making it clear you’re on social platforms and briefly stating what customers can expect to find there –from exclusive content to behind-the-scenes peeks or online only discounts.
Optimise For Success
Your social media profiles can be fully optimised to make you easier to find in searches – this can also contribute to your overall SEO as your profiles will be likely to come up in a search as well as your website – in fact, YouTube search results account for a huge percentage of all search results now. Take a few of your most relevant search terms and work them into the bio sections on your company profiles. You should tie this activity in with some Google advertising automation so your campaigns complement your social profiles and the whole reflects what your audience is actually searching for – this is where good keyword research comes into its own.
Use Your Employees And Business Contacts
They say that its not what you know, but who you know, and this has never been truer than when it comes to getting your social channels seen. Require all employees to add links to your social channels into their email footers and ask them to adjust the details on their LinkedIn profiles to show links to the company social accounts. If you have influential contacts, aim to get them to share your content with their own followers in a reciprocal agreement, especially where the fields are complementary but not competing. In this way you can gain a lot of new followers who are ‘warm leads’ – hit them with a great offer and you may just be able to convert them there and then.