Social Media marketing seems to the new age of marketing. Most green industry businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon, but are they doing it right? A strategy for a successful online business presence is essential, here are some tips on how to accomplish just that.
1. Resarch, and then research some more.
The great thing about researching your insights on social media, is that it’s free! More and more green industry businesses are starting to take advantage of the fact that they can get feedback and clear numbers without spending a dime. Researching not only gives you a leg up on the competition, but it allows you to really understand your audience. By knowing your audience, you’ll know who will be viewing and engaging with your social media sites and thus be able to post content that is engaging to that audience specifically.
Get to know the people that will be accessing your content. Then make the information useful and entertaining for their specific interests.
2. Know your brand
How do your customers see you? Is your business innovative? Helpful? It’s important to understand how your customers see your business, because that is your brand.
Find this out and then translate it to your online presence. If you have a deep understanding of your audience’s needs and behaviors, you can adapt your brand to fit those needs and thus, happy customers. It’s vital to know your brand before going social media-crazy.
Messy, unorganized content will cause you to lose your business’ credibility fast, so know who you are and keep your brand in all of your content. Knowing your brand will not only help streamline your social media strategy, but it will help you in all areas of business including sales. If you know what your particular niche is and what you want your brand to represent, your audience will start to associate your business to that particular niche, if you are consistent and organized.
3. Focus on quality content
If you’re a Seinfeld fan, you’ll remember an episode in which George is in a company meeting and tells a joke that makes everyone laugh. He then immediately gets up and leaves. He learned from Jerry the power of leaving a meeting on a high note.
As George learned, it’s one thing to have a large quantity of content, but the focus of your content should be quality. This ties back to doing your research before producing any content. This will ensure that you’re not just wasting time on content that won’t have any effect. Research is not the only thing to consider though, grammar and sentence structure are basics that are easy to fix and have shown to make a huge difference in how people think about your brand.
Content that has constant grammatical errors looks unprofessional and rushed, so take your time if you are producing word-heavy content.
4. Be a resource
There is a rule called the 70/30 rule. What it states is that 70% of your content on social media should be curated, helpful content from trusted sources. The way we at HindSite do this is to research and follow green industry and general business sites and then pick and choose the content that will be most useful for our audience. We then share that to our social media sites.
According to research done in 2013 by Disruptive Communications, 25% of respondents felt that a brands’ social media updates are more often than not far too sales-y. The 70/30 rule put in place, will ensure that you don’t turn your audience off by being another pushy salesman.
5. Use analytics
Something that we recently started paying attention to here at HindSite is social media analytics. They are extremely useful and a great way to gauge how your audience is interacting with your content. Facebook has a great analytics page that they call Insights. You can access it at any time for free. This information is a wonderful resource. This serves as a means to check whether or not your content efforts are actually making a difference. Specifically, HindSite tracks the number of leads our content brings us; we do this because leads can quickly become customers. If you aren’t keeping track of your numbers, you should start.
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