Making social media work for your business
For many small businesses, having a social media presence is a must. However, too many business owners fall into the trap of feeling like they must be on every platform in existence. And so they spread themselves too thin and miss out on opportunities, or worse, give up on a social media presence entirely.
Having a good understanding of the pros and cons of each platform, as well as understanding where your audience ‘lives’ will go a long way to ensuring social media success for your small business.
Understand the pros and cons of each platform
Understanding the pros and cons of each platform will help you focus your efforts on one or two platforms that are most relevant, and let go of the ones that aren’t. While there are dozens and dozens of widely-used social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are some of the most popular – in the western world at least.
Pros:
Facebook is the most widely-used social media platform in the world. So from an audience reach and brand awareness stand-point, it doesn’t get much better. It’s also great for sharing ‘news-worthy’ content; from blogs to business updates, it’s easy to see why most businesses have a Facebook presence.
Cons:
For some business types, for example, professional services such as lawyers, medical practitioners and even heavy industry, Facebook is seldom utilised. Audiences in these industries tend to connect more through legacy channels.
Pros:
A visually driven platform, Instagram is great for posting colourful and exciting images and videos of your brand and products. It works well for hospitality, fashion and retail businesses – among many others.
Cons:
Whilst images and videos work well on Instagram, written content often gets lost. If you’re trying to get audiences to engage with your news or blog-related content and drive them to your website, then Instagram might not be the platform for you.
Pros:
Twitter is a great platform for engaging, conversing and interacting with your customers on a range of topics and ideas. It can be a great way promote a product or campaign, because you’re often getting real-time feedback on whether your audience likes or dislikes your offering.
Cons:
Twitter’s strength can also be its weakness. A well-intended campaign can go off the rails very quickly and very publicly if you fail to gauge how your audience feels about what your promoting. The #Yourtaxis campaign by the Victorian Taxi Association is a perfect example of a campaign gone wrong.
Know where your audience lives
While this may sound a little ‘stalker-y’, knowing where your audience lives –which social media platform they prefer – is vitally important to using social media successfully.
By weighing up the pros and cons discussed above, you’ll have a bit of a picture of the right platform for your business. And getting an idea of where your audience lives will require a bit of trial and error. That is, testing different content types (e.g. blog article, image, video) on different platforms and seeing which ones perform better.
Social media can be an ever-changing landscape
What’s hot one minute, won’t be the next. Which is why it can be helpful to engage an expert to get started or re-start – whatever the case may be.
From social media kick-starter posts to professional social media branding, Small Business Bundles knows small business branding. Explore one of our bundles now to get started, or get in touch today and see how we can help you grow your business.
