Once upon a time, the success of a business relied heavily upon its physical presence. The brick and mortar stores, the production/manufacturing facilities, and even its headquarters had an impact on how the business was perceived.
Those days are gone now. These days, the online presence of a business is usually more important than its physical location. And one major element of that online presence is social media. That’s where people spend most of their free (and sometimes work) time at, and that’s where you and your business need to reach out to them.
Establishing a social media presence is easy. You just need a profile on social media outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But the part after that is tricky: Managing and growing your business’s social media presence. That requires you to be actively communicative, your content to be engaging, and your overall online presence to be attractive enough to draw in your target audience.
Unlike a professional website or even your LinkedIn profile that needs to exude professionalism, your presence on other social media platforms can be relatively more affable. Just subtle differences in your different social media profiles can help you establish better connections with your target audience/clientele on each platform.
Power of Intelligent Social Media Management
Social media management can be a bit difficult if you directly jump into it with a learning-by-trial-and-error mindset. If you are adamant about doing it on your own, rather than hiring a dedicated employee or outsourcing it to a professional team, make sure you do your research before you start creating and managing your social media accounts.
Some tips that can help you with your social media management are:
- Create a schedule and stick to it. If your social media following knows that you publish fresh, engaging content every other day, every week, or even every month (not recommended), they will get used to it and, hopefully, wait for it. It will also help you with your broader goals, like reaching a certain number of users or maximizing engagements.
- Be active on your social media outlets. You don’t need to cater to people who might just be on your social media platforms to disrupt a good thing, but you do need to respond to legitimate queries, complaints, and even appreciation.
- Understanding your audience and creating client/consumer personas go beyond the scope of simple social media management, but it's the area of the social media marketing that's most affected by it. If you don't know who your consumers are and what their expectations are from your business and your product/services (even if you can't fulfill them all or right away), you will not be able to engage them the right way.
- If you have a local business or a decent shipping system, contests and giveaways can be a great way to increase the number of eyes on your business’s social media presence. They don’t have to be grand gifts. Just creating a sense of competition and winning is enough to entice a large number of people to know about your product/services.
- Create helpful and engaging content, and be subtle about marketing. Blatantly salesy content puts a lot of people off right away. But instead, if you create content that’s actually helpful, fun, and something that people want to read, you might gain clients more organically.
Conclusion
Social media management is an important element of digital marketing and a business’s online presence as a whole. And it’s something you cannot take lightly. If you are unsure that you may not be able to do a good job of it yourself, you may want to look into outsourcing. Instead of just leaving your social media management to someone else, you should keep track of what they are doing, and learn. Since it’s your business and no one else knows it better than you, you will ultimately be the ideal person to run it (or at least control how it’s run).
