In 2017, if your business isn’t online then it might as well not exist. In this new digital age, traditional marketing methods alone aren’t enough to effectively drive lead generation and sales within a business. The world is now connected 24/7 via social media, bringing people, businesses and services on opposite sides of the globe together. If you want your business to be successful, you need to invest in social media tools and channels to promote the name of your business, attract new customers and improve brand loyalty.
A Diploma of Social Media Marketing can help you achieve this. Social media platforms let people interact and share through online communities. If you are looking to increase your brand awareness, drive inbound traffic and improve your customer service on a budget, then understanding how to use social media marketing is worth your time and effort! Below are 3 basic ways you can start using social media to promote your business today:
Start a Facebook Page:
Established in 2004, Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows individuals to create profiles, upload photos and videos, share content and send public or private messages to their family and friends. Facebook is by far the most popular social media networking site, with a reported 1.94 billion people accessing the site each month around the world. An incredible 15 million of these users are said to originate from Australia. Facebook Newsroom, 2017.
In the last few years, many businesses have recognised Facebook’s potential for building relationships with customers through ‘Pages’ – a popular Facebook function that allows users to create and promote public pages about specific topics, events or areas of interest.
If you are looking for an easy, and simple way to launch your business online, creating a Facebook page is a great way to start. With Facebook pages you can advertise your business name, location, contact details, full list of products and services and customer reviews and ratings. Customers can easily visit this page for this information and send private messages to you about your business to ask questions or make suggestions. Overall, Facebook pages is a great way to interact with customers, publish promotional content and share updates about your products and services. For example: If you were a Florist looking to promote your store, you could use your Facebook page to run a special promotion and advertise it through a post. Customers who ‘like’ your page will see this promotion in their newsfeed and might choose to share it with family and friends – increasing your audience reach and brand awareness.
Setting up a business page on Facebook can be done in a few minutes. All you need is your business name and information, your logo, a few images and a call to action (CTA). To create a customised Facebook page for your business follow these easy steps:
1. Login to Facebook and go to facebook.com/pages/create
2. Select a Page category. For example: “Local business, Product or Public Figure”
3. Select a more specific category from the drop down menu and fill out the required information
4. Click Get Started and follow the on-screen instructions
5. Fill in your page details including name, location, contact and display images.
6. Share with family and friends to increase page ‘likes’ (source: Facebook Help)
Create an Instagram Account:
Launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram is a photo-sharing app that allows users to share pictures and videos from their smartphone, both publicly and privately. Although Instagram is a relatively new social networking app, it connects 600 million users across the world every day. Instagram, About Us. Users on Instagram sign up, create a profile and upload images or videos to their account. Similar to Facebook, when users post a photo or video, it is displayed on their profile and the newsfeed of others who choose to follow them.
Instagram has become a great marketing tool for business for a number reasons, including, but not limited to its photo sharing capabilities, added locations through geotags, hashtags, live video streaming and instant data reporting. Lisa Montenegro, Founder and President of Digital Marketing Experts says Instagram has taken cue from Facebook with its back end insights for business accounts, helping increase advertising efforts with ease and simplicity. “Want to know which posts got the most likes, comments and shares?” she says, “Or which time of day delivers the most eyeballs, or the demographics of your followers and how long they spend on Instagram in a day? The data from Instagram helps business owners understand this and create and schedule posts in the smartest possible way.” Lisa Montenegro, Forbes, 2017
Hashtags help promote a business’s name and popularity on Instagram. A hashtag is a word or short phrase that begins with a ‘#’ symbol. If a user clicks on the hashtag they will be taken to a list of linked search results for the term. Through this hashtag function, a business can start a new trend, find new followers and engage with new customers. Businesses can reach out to customers by asking them to share a picture of themselves with the products with a #hashtag for a chance to win. In return, the business gets greater exposure to the users hundreds of followers and follower potentially wins a prize. Not only does interacting with customers on Instagram help strengthen customer relationships, it also establishes customer loyalty.
Another great way Instagram can increase brand awareness is through the geotag function. This geotag function allows users to upload photos and videos and tag the name of the location it was taken. This works for all businesses, but especially well for restaurants, cafes, bars, shops or entertainment hubs etc. For example: Say an Instagram user visited your small café, enjoyed their meal took a photo of it to upload to Instagram and share with their hundreds of followers. When they upload their photo they will most likely add the name and location of your café – inspiring other users to come and eat at your café. In 2017, social media influencers, such as food and lifestyle bloggers on Instagram have a greater impact than we know.
Run a Promoted Tweet on Twitter:
The micro-blogging smartphone app Twitter is an online news and social network that lets users create and share 140 character text posts. Known as ‘tweets,’ these posts are restricted to 140 characters to keep posts short and engaging. Like bursts of information. Founded in 2011, Twitter allows users to ‘follow’ individuals or businesses they are interested for updates that then appear in their newsfeed. Users can use #hashtags and mention each other in ‘tweets’ by using the @ symbol. With over 328 million users, Twitter is a useful marketing tool for businesses to promote products, converse with customers, monitor feedback and trends and provide customer service. Statistica, 2017
Twitter offers a range of advertising services to help businesses promote themselves, including promoted tweets. Promoted tweets are advertisements purchased by businesses who want to reach a wider group of users or to spark engagement with existing followers. Targeted users see these tweets as ordinary posts and can re-tweet, like and reply to them as per usual. If your goal is to drive awareness for your business, promoted tweets can:
1. Expand the reach of your content like blog posts, company website
2. Connect with influencers and brand advocates by ensuring they see your content
3. Promote awareness around events and product launches
4. Ask for re-tweets to gain an even broader audience for your messages (Source: Twitter Business, What Are Promoted Tweets)
Overall, a tweet is a very effective way to communicate to the public. When composing a tweet you should make sure to include a #hashtag, a ‘mention’ and links to your business website or other social media platforms. As a rule, every tweet should include an image. Why? Jesse Mawhinney, Marketing Manager of Kula Matters says “when people read information, they’re only likely to remember 10% of that information in three days. However, if a relevant image is paired with the same information, people were likely to remember 65% of the information three days later!” Jesse Mawhinney, Hubspot 2017,
To create a promoted tweet only takes a few minutes. After you create a Twitter account for your business, follow these 5 easy steps:
1. Write a Tweet to promote
2. Click on “Promote this Tweet”
3. Select the location you’d like to target (options include country, state, region)
4. Select your budget
5. Confirm your spend (source: Twitter Business, Quick Promote)
Join the world’s fastest growing industry with Australia’s first and only Diploma of Social Media Marketing! Start your journey to become qualified in social media marketing by speaking to a Course Advisor, call us on 1300 236 364 or email us at info@queensford.edu.au.