The do’s and don’ts of using social media for business – What beginners should know!
Let’s say you run a small business, for which you have a website, and you also have four different business profiles on four social media apps. So far, so good. However, to make your digital marketing efforts come to life, there needs to be solid cross-referencing between your social media profiles and your website. That is where most business owners get stuck, and after a few months, they stop focusing on some of their social media profiles or their website. Unless both your social media presence and your website nourish and feed off the good points of each other, your digital strategy would quickly lose steam. So, let us look at a few ways in which social media can be smartly used.
The same Size Does Not Fit All
Either due to laziness or due to crippling lack of time, many business owners create a single set of content and repeat it across social media profiles. That would never work because a user of Instagram would be very different from a user of Linked In, and the messaging to both these individuals should be vastly different to make an impact and encourage them to visit your website.
Be Selective
Just because someone told you that a social media presence could bring traffic to your website, it is not necessary that all social media would suit your brand or product’s personality perfectly. For example, if you have a teenage fashion brand you are trying to promote, then a presence on LinkedIn might not be required at all. If you still go ahead and create a Linked In profile, you will need to spend time and effort to maintain the profile, or you will need to spend money to get an expert agency to do it for you. However, all that might not even get you any results.
Repeat After Me
Several good social media posts will be missed by someone or the other because they were offline or there were too many feeds vying for their attention. So if you have made an excellent post, then do not hesitate to post it again after a reasonable gap of a few days or even a week or two. Say you ran a quiz on your Facebook profile which generated much traction. However, it might still have been missed by some of your Instagram followers. So if you repeat a similar quiz or even the same quiz on your Facebook account next month, there is a chance that some who had missed out earlier would see it this time. Just take care that the repetitions are not so close together that your followers think it is spammy.
Everyone understands that social media can be useful in generating repeat or new traffic to a website, but the trick is to use social media smartly, and not follow the herd blindly.
Author Bio: Norma Calhoun was a marketing consultant and metamorphosed into a social media expert as her experience grew. Her Facebook friend list, as well as Instagram followers count, are the stuff of legends.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
