This training fiche is focused on how to use, expand and improve your social network, with as end goal to increase your market. For every company, these days online promotions is an important part of the daily business. When you are a new company or if you have a low advertising budget, the many options can be daunting, especially when you are also concentrating on the daily needs of your business. However, major search engines, social media, and advertising services have made it a lot easier for you to promote your business online.
When you are looking for a faster and cheaper option to find your target audience you can use social network websites, they can also help you with the growth of your business. When you create a professional social media presence on a variety of websites, you should harness the power of connecting to new and returning customers. A good social network presence can help you with conducting an inexpensive market research, creating public relations and gain a better understanding of your place in the market. In the content, you can find how to use social networking sites to help you grow your business:
First of all, when you are creating a marketing plan, you need to ask yourself these questions; what are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing? Who is your target audience? Which social media website is your target audience using? How would they use social media? What message do you want to send to your audience with the online marketing campaign?
Start with a clear strategy: Why do you want to increase your contacts? Is it to find new customers or drive traffic to your site? Different channels require different approaches. For example, increasing your contacts on Facebook will have different benefits then when your recommendations on LinkedIn are growing.
Sign up for accounts at social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook: Choose social networking communities that best reflect your target group, demographics. For example, LinkedIn is focused on building business connections, while Facebook is a fun way for people of all ages and backgrounds to share news about their lives, preferences of products and activities. You can add social networking icons of badges in conspicuous places on your website for each social media platform that you are using. These important icons tell your customers on which platforms you are active on and encourages them to join your page.
Sign up existing customers: Take advantage of your clients and their potential followings. When people visit your website or online store, ask them to join your mailing list and social network, request their social media accounts and email addresses to send them exclusive promotional incentives as a thank you, along with the request to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ your company. Include action buttons (for example, “Like this page” and “learn more”) in your posts to gain more interest, clicks and views to your page. Provide a link to a sign-up page on your website to make it easier for them.
Share news about your company: Social network marketing keeps your customers informed about what is going on in your office, for example, share the news about a launch of new products. Normally holding a contest with free giveaways in your social networking community can help you with creating, even more, excitement about your company.
Tip: Keep your announcements brief but make them compelling enough to attract the readers.
Follow the one- in- seven rule: This is a rule that you can use with promotional posts on your social networks. The rule is, that one in the seven posts can be a promotion that advertising your company. The remaining six should be focused on sharing valuable content, including posts from the community.
Ask conversation - starter questions: Most people enjoy sharing their opinions, so ask within your social network community their opinion about topics that are relevant to your business and interesting to them. Because the content of social media websites are nowadays indexed by all internet search engines, your active social network presence helps your brand with the recognition by enabling a higher search result ranking. The higher your company information is placed in a search engine, the easier it is for potential customers to find you. For example, a clothing store could ask their opinion about the idea of selling a new clothing line, to see what the customers think about the new clothing line.
Share your expertise: Post little - known, fun facts in the form of questions with a special offer presented to the first person to answer correctly.
Understand your audience: Ask your friends on your social network relevant questions about what they expect and want from the type of service or product that your company offers. This is a cheap way of doing market research.
Make connections: When you have a lot of connections in your network it is easier for you to make the introduction to new and potential clients, your brand will be well remembered.
Watch what customers are saying about your products, campaigns, and other activity: By measuring the activities of your customers on your post, you can get a clear overview about what they think of the campaign or product. When people say good things about your business, they are often happy to allow you to reprint their feedback elsewhere in your promotional campaign. It is important to do more than post promotions and daily special on Facebook. The key is that you keep your brand on top of the mind of your customer in a positive way.
Be authentic: For a social media campaign to be successful it is critical that your personality as a company shines through. By staying true to who you are, what your do and where you stand for is critical.
Provide value: While including posts that are fun, it is important that you make sure that your posts reflect your personality. It is also important that your campaigns have a content that fit your target audience.
Community manager: A community manager is, somebody within the company that keeps the social networks up to date, for example, the Facebook page. There are a few qualities that a community manager should have.
Strong communication skills: It may not come as a surprise that the person who is in charge of the social networks needs to have strong communication skills.
Good judgment: In a lot of industries, one of the things a community manager needs to be is a curator. The community manager should be able to parse through all the content coming out of an organization and decide what is good to share and how to share and on which platform.
Organizational skills: For a lot of companies, a community manager, needs to manage multiple different social platforms. They also need to track the feedback and share this information with their employees. When you do not organize these activities, they can become a lot at once.
Adaptability: The key of a successful community manager, is being flexible when it comes to the workplace. The work that a community manager does will often extend beyond creating conversations with the target audience on the social networks.
Passion for the brand: In a lot of ways, the community manager, is the eyes and ears of a business. But he is also responsible for the voice of the company on social networks. Most of the time the target group want to interact with someone who loves the brand as much as they do.
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