25 Top tips for Successful Social Media for business

These days marketing is ‘social’. If you want to get more social and but don’t know where to start here are some top tips to help you unravel the social media maze.

In a nutshell the aim is to attract followers and develop engagement through likes or shares of your posts. You want ‘engagement’ and remember it is ‘social’.

1. Decide which social media platforms are relevant to you.
Research and find out which ones your customers/contacts are on. Remember different audiences might use different platforms.

2. Be selective – do one or two well to start with
Test the water and find out what works well on one or two platforms. You can always move on to other platforms later.

3. Build your profile
Make your ‘page’ look attractive. Make sure it reflects you, your brand, products and company in a good way.

4. Build your audience
You need to follow people to start with so they know you are there and to get them to follow you. Twitter is useful for finding out who to follow. Make sure all your material eg. website, POS, emails etc tells people how to find you on social media.

5. Build your page
Aim to post regularly during the week/day. Think about frequency. Make sure the quality of your posts is consistent and reflects the full range of your activities, products, services

6. Make it relevant to the platform you are using
Make sure you think about each platform and the type of audience you will be engaging with. Make sure your posts are written in such a way that ‘fits’ with the audience – they all have a different ‘language’. Be careful of using exactly the same wording for different platforms.

7. Understand and learn
Look at other brands that your customers will be looking at and research what they like. See which posts get the most likes or shares and learn from the leaders in your market.

8. Make it visual
Pictures say a thousand words- and a great picture or video will get more shares and likes than a bad one or a post that doesn’t have a picture at all.

9. Make it personal
Social media is about being ‘real’ and reflecting your personality or your brand personality. Use it to provide evidence in a personal and emotionally engaging way.

10. Have a plan
Make a plan for the next 3 months, which weaves in your key messages and provides a structure to work from. That way your social media will encompass everything you need to get across to your audience and you will be more likely to do it.

11. Create campaigns
Think of ways to create campaigns around specific events both inside and outside your business. Link to special offers, the season, TV programmes, new product launches etc.

12. Schedule your posts
Use scheduling software like Hootsuite to schedule everything in advance, maybe once a week. It is more time effective and means that you will stick to your plan.

13. Have flexibility
Having said that, don’t be too rigid. Don’t forget on the spot opportunities for quick pictures of something that ‘suddenly happens’ in your business will probably make the best post! These add personality and bring colour to your page.

14. Include links to your website
Don’t forget to link to your website – social media is an important search tool.

15. Use a url shortener
Url shorteners like bitly or owly are useful for shortening long web addresses and tracking click throughs

16. Cross share between platforms
Some platforms are more suitable for building up information about a product or event. E.g. Facebook and Pinterest. Use other platforms to publicise your page e.g. twitter.

17. Use hashtags wisely
You can build a campaign or tweets for an event around a hashtag. Make is relevant, short and memorable. Don’t over use hashtags. Research what others are doing and follow what works.

18. Ask your supporters to like and share your content
Get your staff, colleagues, customers and friends to like and share your content. This will build your reach and develop engagement.

19. Create great content
Use our top tips to find the heartbeat of your business and create content that really works.

20. Measure your success
Look at metrics to see how you are doing. Find out which posts are most popular and create the best engagement. See what difference that makes to your web hits with google analytics.

21. Build your likes and your reach using paid for posts
Boost your posts by paying to reach a wider audience, higher up their newsfeed. Start small and see what a difference it makes. Build the likes on your page.

22. Share other peoples content
Make sure you are being ‘social’ and interacting by retweeting or liking other people’s content. Remember content still needs to be relevant to your followers but it is very powerful to be social.

23. Have a conversation
Remember it is ‘social’!

24. Build a community
Your followers are your fans and your opportunity to create a community. Give them what they need and it will grow!

25. Keep on learning
Everyone is learning new ways of using social media – it is definitely here to stay. So embrace it, learn and enjoy the adventure and the benefits!