Today, Social media presents entrepreneurs with a pool of opportunities to expand their businesses and boost their profitability. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are great platforms for small businesses to expand their businesses by creating conversations with prospective buyers and by serving as a medium for customer care services. Engaging with the customers via social media platforms helps understand their needs better and improve their service delivery.
A quick view on social media platforms:
Facebook: Widely used social media platform all over the world with over 2 billion active users. It helps SMEs both in brand awareness as well as lead generation.
LinkedIn: One of the main factors which SMEs can’t avoid as there is no other platform better than LinkedIn for quality leads.
Twitter: Twitter is slightly different from other social platforms as it’s mostly news based. But still, it has immense power to change the image of your brand if done right.
Instagram: Owned by Facebook and is the fastest growing social media, thanks mainly to its focus on visuals. Best medium to promote your products as there is no better way to showcase your product’s quality than through pictures.
Pinterest: Another social discovery platform that gives importance to visuals. In this, you can portray the complete story behind your product via images.
In recent times, social media has helped both SMEs and multinationals to effectively handle customer relationships.
If you have a reasonable social media presence, let your customers understand that everything is under control.
One of the main areas where small businesses have made good use of social media is in advertising and marketing. Earlier, companies had to use television, newspapers or other conventional platforms to promote their services and products globally. Many people couldn’t afford this as it was an expensive exercise.
Today, with enough effort, anyone can create a good number of Facebook fans, twitter follows or YouTube views. And you can both advertise and market your products and services at minimal costs to a global audience.
SMEs can attract new customers via social media in various ways:
You must know how to engage people on your selected social media platforms. Researchers revealed that people spend their most of the time on social media. Posting image of your products or sharing information about your products and services in a correct way can help you to reach out your targeted audience.
1. Be Flexible: Every strategy may not work for you as situation changes. You may identify that it is time to change your current strategy and try out something new and more interesting than the previous. Don’t stick to a strategy which doesn’t work for you.
Produce Quality Content That Is Genuinely Useful: People usually think many times before purchasing any product. Experts say that people wish to purchase from the one which is quite popular or they have seen many times in their everyday life. So you must be very careful while marketing your products- use images, interesting words and so on…
2. Entertain Your Fans: Always engage your fans or followers with your posts. Keep an eye on what they like and their comments in your posts, you can get to know from their comments if they get bored. You are supposed to be persistent while implementing a plan and in monitoring your results to know whether you’re on a right track which can let you achieve your goals.
3. Social Organic Search: Sharing a post several time is good for organic search as it will make the post reach to a huge audience. Search engines assume that more shares a post has, the more useful and important readers deem it.
4. Follow Branding Guidelines: You must follow the branding guidelines whenever you are promoting your brands. As if you don’t follow those guidelines it may affect your brand negatively.
5. Social Ads: Social ads provide the most flexible content promotion and are proven best to turn visitors into leads and customers. Making use of social media ads can build your brand recognition and double your organic search click-through and conversion rates!
6. By Creating Events: Social media event marketing isn’t too much time consuming and moreover social media can play a huge part in an event promotion. Consider creating a branded area for people to create good images, take photos, etc.
7. By Initiating Group Discussions: As all know, Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites, so creating and participating in Facebook groups is simply beneficial. It will help you to get noticed by others.
8. Leveraging Social Media Influencers: Influencers are really one of the big deal in social media. Leveraging the influencers enables you to access to a huge circle of influence instantly, helping you to build more audience from which you can build a long-term and stable campaign.
To get the best from social media for your small or medium enterprise, you must lay out a plan first. Do you really need to join social networking site? What is the goal? The objective may be for promotional purposes, customer relations, marketing and advertising and sales among others. The goals have to be measurable.
The most important question, however is among the many social networking sites which are fit for your business? To answer this, consider reviewing where most of your customers belong. To stay safe, use more than one, have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for a start.
Social media tools that no “SME” should be without:
Social media can be the most powerful method of gaining exposure for SME globally as having a social media presence creates a close connection between the brand and its followers. Following are 4 tools which no SME can avoid.
Evernote: A free platform helping users to share their ideas and with this, you can also compile content.
Google Analytics: Provides free and enterprise tools so as to measure online & offline data to gain customer insights.
MailChimp: An online email marketing solution to send email, manage subscribers and track results.
Statusbrew: Allowing users to schedule posts and manage audiences on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
Social media is an effective and adorable way for SME to attract their target audience all over the world.
If you’re an SME and not on social media, then you’re missing all the fun…