Your online presence is made up of a multitude of things: your website, your Facebook fan page, your Twitter stream, an Instagram account, and a whole lot more. It’s all a bunch of different parts working in concert with one another to form a huge mosaic. If you have a good online presence it’ll be easy for potential customers to find your business wherever they hang out online. This may get people to visit your website, and even buy your products or services. With the rise in social media and online marketing, it has become increasingly important for small businesses to have a strong online presence to get their name out to local customers. While simply setting up a Facebook or Twitter account is a great starting point, there are several things you will want to consider when preparing to build your online community from zero to one.
Have you ever wondered how big stars like Justin Bieber rose to fame? He was in the right place with the right talent at the right time, sure, but with a creative social media strategy, he took his online presence to new heights and ultimately viral fame. You can do the same thing for your product by harnessing the power of social media – from Twitter to Pinterest, to Youtube. Having an online presence is a great way to show off your product, connect with potential customers, and build a solid reputation for yourself and your brand on the web.
Being in the right places online (or in other words, the correct platform) is important for small businesses and entrepreneurs. However, keeping your online presence updated is what makes the biggest difference. Being active on social networks and sharing your content can gain you visibility and generate leads for your business. The concept is simple: find people and communities online who are already talking about your area of expertise and join in the conversation. This strategy has worked in the past for so many businesses and influencers because it’s so easy to do (and yet, still provides a heap of benefits). Jump in with both feet to a new space or community that enjoys learning about your business and niche. Provide value to these community participants simply by adding your opinions, offering advice, or making connections. The community will appreciate it and you’ll become known as the “go-to” when someone needs help with your area of expertise.
How social media has given us more ways to win fans than ever before
Despite the fact that more people than ever are using social media, many businesses still aren’t leveraging these platforms to market their business and win new customers. It can be scary choosing the right platform and committing to generating content. Heck, what do you even post? But I’m here to tell you that the opportunity to gain customers through these platforms for free is far too great to throw away.
Social media has given us more ways to win fans than ever before. It’s all about building relationships and becoming a trusted brand in order to drive sales and boost traffic to your website. With so much competition online, you need to be able to grab people’s attention and focus them on your products/services. Social media is the perfect way to do this, but only if you know-how.
The following tips will help you get started with organic social media marketing that your small business could be doing for free.
1) Plan Your Social Media Strategy
There are many things that you need to think about before jumping into social media. You can’t just jump in and start posting things without a plan as you will lose time and energy (and no one wants that).
To be successful on social media, you must have a solid strategy in place, and the first step is to plan your social media strategy by answering a few questions about your business and its social media goals:
Who is my target audience? Who am I trying to reach with my content?
What kind of content will I post? What content will my target audience engage with? Will it be original content or maybe a curation of other people’s content?
How often should I post content? How frequently can I make and support new content?
Who will help me manage my accounts? Do I have a tool at my disposal to make content management or creation easier? Would it be more time and cost-effective to hire an agency?
2) Choose the platforms that are best for you.
Make no assumptions about where your target audience spends their online time.
If you’re targeting Gen Z, your instinct may tell you to avoid Facebook in favor of Instagram and TikTok. However, roughly a quarter of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 and 24.
When selling to baby boomers, social media may not appear to be a primary focus. However, it should be. Facebook and Pinterest are the most popular social media platforms among baby boomers. Adults over 65 are the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook.
Perhaps you believe TikTok marketing isn’t suited for your company. Even well-known firms with audiences well beyond Generation Z are experimenting with this platform and achieving big results. Vessi is a fantastic Canadian footwear brand. They’ve only been around for a few months, but they’ve already surpassed 200,000 followers. How did they manage to grow so quickly? Giveaways. To earn User Generated Content, followers, and revenue, they’re using a unique duet giveaway strategy via TikTok videos (which have a way of easily going viral).
There are a lot of tools. I have a few favorites, depending on what I’m looking for. If you want to see which networks your audience is on, then it’s Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Twitter Analytics. With Google Analytics you’ll get a list of all the sites your audience visits (even if they don’t visit your site). With Facebook Insights you’ll get a list of all the apps your audience uses (even if they don’t use Facebook). And with Twitter Analytics you’ll get a list of all the devices your audience uses (even if they don’t use Twitter).
If you’re looking for something more specific, like who in your audience uses Instagram or Pinterest, then it’s Klout and SimilarWeb. Both tools will show you how much time people spend on each network. Whichever tool gives you the most data that aligns with your goals is the best tool for you.
3) Be aware of your target audience
One of the benefits of using social media for your company is that you can hyper-target your audience with organic posts or ads. But first, you must determine who your company’s target audience is.
Begin by gathering information about your present consumers. Compile information about their age, sex, location, marital status, income, family dynamics, or any other piece of information you think may tie to their decision to purchase your product or service. Once you’ve collected this data, look for trends to identify a key takeaway about your customers’ demographics. Maybe you notice they are all between 35-45 years of age, maybe they’re all making less than $50,000 per year, or maybe they’re almost always female. Whatever the insight is that you find, this will play a pivotal role in developing the content you need to speak clearly to your target audience on social media. Even more so, it’ll aid in your hyper-targeting when segmenting an audience for any social media advertising.
After you’ve determined your target audience, you may construct buyer personas to further evaluate the best ways to communicate with your potential customers
4) How to easily create content
Content is king in the 21st century and it is not just text. It may seem intimidating that you need to create content, but the truth is that it can be pretty easy with the correct systems and tools in place.
Trying to create content around specific keywords and topics is a waste of time. You are much better off if you can write about your knowledge and expertise in a way that will make people want to read what you have to say. Keeping readers engaged and wanting to read more of the value you provide will yield better long-term results than any tricks/hacks.
Content creation is often easier if you follow these simple steps:
1. Create an outline of what you want to say.
It doesn’t have to be perfect or formal, just a basic outline of what you want to say will do. If it helps, try writing it as a letter to someone else and then adapt it from there.
2. Write the first draft and then refine it after you’ve finished.
Simply put your thoughts down on the page and keep going until you’re done. Don’t worry about trying to make it perfect because that can hold you back from getting started at all.
3. Keep going by improving on what you’ve already written as well as adding new ideas as they occur to you.
Even a final draft isn’t really final. You can always add to it at a later time or repost the content entirely with new insights or discoveries if there’s more to say. This is even more true for long-form writing like Blog Posts where editing and refreshing the content after it’s been posted is encouraged and is highly favorable to Google’s search algorithm.
5) Engage in groups, communities, and trending threads
Engaging in groups, communities, and trending threads can give your brand a boost. Anywhere on social media where lots of people are already hanging out has the potential for being a huge lead driver for your business. Here are some tips on how to engage with groups on social media:
1) Find groups that are relevant to your niche – This is by far the most important tip. If you do not find a group that’s relevant to your business, don’t bother engaging with them because you won’t get any results. There are many tools out there to help you find relevant groups. I recommend using Meetup and Facebook search.
2) Focus on quality over quantity – It’s important that you build relationships with the right people, not just anyone. If someone doesn’t buy from you after you’ve built a relationship with them, it will be hard for you to continue providing value to that person in the long term and the relationship may fizzle. You’re better off building relationships with 10 people who will buy from you than 100 people who won’t.
3) Don’t just post links – Posting links only will get you banned from every group very quickly. To avoid this, include an engaging message when posting your link so that it feels like more than just a shameless attempt to sell something. Ideally, the content of your post should be 75% engaging message and 25% service-offering with the associated URL/link.
Encouraging fan engagement is the key to growing your online presence
Many small businesses make the mistake of keeping their website and social media completely separate. But the most successful businesses have a connected ecosystem of content online where interested readers can quickly navigate between social accounts, blogs, landing pages, reviews, and more with a simple click of a button. How a business sets this up is easier than you might think:
On your Social Media Pages – Each social media account allows for at least one (1) external link. This is usually the best opportunity to have your website URL in an easy to find spot. Readers and followers of your content want a quick way to navigate to and from your social accounts to the place they can take that next step with your business, your website. If you have more than one place you’d like to send these followers to engage with your business, you can use a Linktree which acts as a landing page containing a multitude of links, instead of just a single link.
On your Website – Explorers of your website often want to check out your social media profiles to see if you’re engaging, active, and to learn more about what you do. At Opasite, we always design websites with social proof in mind, which is why we provide multiple opportunities for website visitors to navigate to the business’s social media pages. The best placements for icons and links to social media are usually in the footer, top navbar, the About Us page, and the Contact page (places where users are naturally looking for their next place to navigate to). Additionally, sometimes we like to integrate social media into the website experience by embedding a social media feed (like a Twitter or Instagram feed) directly onto a prominent webpage, further exemplifying the social proof without navigating away from the website.
Email – People don’t realize that there’s a wildly available opportunity to make every contact you send an email to into a fan or follower of your brand. It’s free and simple to create an email signature that’s adhered to each email you send. This email signature is free real estate that puts links (and maybe even some targeted messaging) to your social media pages in front of your most engaged contacts.
Social Media Guide For Small Businesses
Growing your online presence isn’t easy. You need to have a strong foundation in order to build upon it, but that takes time. It doesn’t help that there are countless tools for this purpose. But, when you’re looking to step up your online presence game, knowing what strategies are out there is the first step to growth.
It’s vital to have a social media presence, but it won’t be very effective unless you know the basics. Social media is like any tool: it does its best work when you know how to wield it and when you put in the time and effort to use it correctly. With that in mind, we came up with this list of tips and tricks to help ensure that your brand has a great social media presence. All you have to do is follow the advice here, and you should be well on your way to having an online presence that matches up with your brand’s appearance and reputation.
