We may have started a new year, but there is one thing that has and will remain constant: social media. It may have traditionally become popular for personal use, but if you know how to leverage it, social media can be a hugely important tool to help promote and improve your business. Clients and customers are using social media more than ever before to express their opinions, contact companies with their queries or complaints, find new services and ask for advice. Clearly, there is a lot of potential to be tapped into.
Here are a few different ways to utilize social media for your business in 2018.
Promote business
In order to promote your business using social media you must actually have profiles and be active on social media. It might seem like an obvious point, but the first step in utilizing Social Media for your business is creating a strong profile that truly reflects your company and how you want it to be perceived. It takes money, time and resources for a business to create content and promote it- but perhaps not as much as you might think, and the money that you spend of things such as sponsored posts on Facebook will be nothing compared to the long-term benefits of good marketing. According to Experian, 80% of marketers are already promoting their content on social media so you would also be wise to check out the pages of your competitors to try and understand what does and doesn’t work for your target audience.
It is also vital to remember to customize content to each specific platform. For example, be sure you are publishing content that fits to the scale of the platform you are utilizing. If you’re unsure how, be sure to read the huge number of articles out there offering advice on how to create successful posts on each of the main social media platforms. There are some examples out there on LinkedIn, for example, where the content has been visually cropped and does not show what the business intended to promote. Remember that headlines, images and engagement matter.
Gain useful information on customers/competitors
Make sure you’re not wasting valuable information that can help you tailor your online presence to engage the audience you’re targeting. Any information that businesses can use to help them understand their customers and competitors is helpful. There is a huge amount of public information readily available on social media platforms. It is simply a matter of sifting through it and finding what is useful. You can do this AI technology (no this doesn’t involve replacing your employees with robots quite yet.) Using AI software from companies set up specifically to help businesses with their productivity, data can be gathered from blogs, social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and forums in its natural language text. Then, if you have the software to do it, it can be converted into quantitative data by deriving high-quality information from text. This process, though easily confused with data mining, is actually known as text mining. It is a service offered by many tech companies and you would be wise to do a little more research into this as perhaps it is all you need to bring your up to the next level.
This way, businesses can, for example, use social media to learn where and how their customers, partners and competitors are engaging. Perhaps they favor one social media platform, or are not active on social media and other avenues of engagement should be prioritized.
Discover new trends
Within every industry, new trends, themes and topics should be, and are, consistently introduced. Businesses can leverage social media to learn what is being discussed across platforms and what these new trends are gaining vital consumer insights.
To do this you can use a number of social media tracking tools and analytics. There will be patterns amongst engagement and where customer needs are shifting that can be useful for all business actions. As a result, organizations can focus on the positives, adapt as changes arise and also discover what isn’t working as hoped. Some trends outlast others and it can be difficult for businesses to keep up when there are so many other business areas to focus on. Trends on individual business practices, such as a stream of responses to a new campaign or feedback about a new product are often visible online. It is up to businesses to see and understand what is trending, meaning it is a good idea to set up a monthly report system to keep track of the changes you make to your social strategy- and which posts have created the most active engagement in order to plan for the future.
Social media can help bridge that gap so businesses can focus on other matters, but remain engaged.
Reputation management
Businesses can use social media to monitor perceptions of their organization, manage their reputation and learn exactly what is being said and by who. Customers, partners, clients and even the public in general often provide responses and reflections over social media that they may not in face-to-face interactions. This can help businesses drive marketing actions, focus in on target segments and adjust overall business decisions to maintain and even improve their reputation.
A simple way of protecting your company’s reputation online is creating a good customer care plan. Responding to customer queries and complaints quickly and professionally, and ensuring that no negative posts are left unanswered or resolved in the public domain. If you receive a lot of queries or complaints, set up read-made responses directing users to the information they require while all the while staying professional and clear.
Utilizing social media can be a fast, cheap and powerful way to increase attention for your business. Every engagement tactic, response and decision can be improved with use of the information provided by public content readily available. It is also possible to keep up with what your target market actually wants and needs. In today’s data-centric and technology-infused world, it is crucial to keep up, especially as a business. How will you use social media to improve your business?