Social Media is one of the best tools available to help grow your business. You can easily get important and valuable information out to current or potential customers at no cost. The struggle with social media is this; How to utilize it effectively to grow your business?

Most companies don’t have a social media strategy in place, or understand how it can help their business. When you understand what it takes to have a great social media strategy and know how to implement it, you will be able to extract all the benefits of these free systems.

In this blog, we will touch on a few key points that will help you create a great social media strategy to drive business.

UTILIZE MULTIPLE PLATFORMS

There’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and many more social media platforms available to take advantage of. Depending on your market, different ones will range in popularity, but to have a great social media strategy you need to be engaging on multiple platforms. This will help you gain and maintain a diverse online presence and brand personality.

A Brand Personality refers to things about your brand that the consumer can relate to; an effective brand increases its value by having a consistent set of traits that the target consumer markets enjoy and finds personable or relatable. Depending on your market, you will want to be calculated in how to achieve your ideal brand personality, and social media is an effective way to portray that. There are some brands that appeal to the comic in all of us, while other decide on a more conservative and professional approach. If you can create a brand personality that fits with who you are as a company, but also appeals to your target audience, you'll find that your social media followers will be much more willing to engage with you online.

Because of how our society is progressing, with more and more being done online, we suggest at the very least having a Facebook and LinkedIn account. Facebook is the largest social network, which makes it the best place to target a large amount of people. LinkedIn on the other hand is not as popular, but it has a very specific demographic of people (Business Professionals). As you begin to develop your brand personality, other social networks may come into play. Make sure you are always evaluating the networks you are using, as well as other potential options for the future.

Having multiple social networks will also help with your websites SEO. Google ranks your social network activity, and the content that is posted on them as credit to your site. They can also be used as an opportunity to drive traffic to your website through what you're posting, from multiple locations (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.), resulting in more intentional website traffic and better leads.

YOU NEED TO HAVE CONTENT TO POST

This is always a difficult one. A huge problem with social media is you can run out of things to talk about. Only posting about your services all the time can leave people disinterested with your brand because it is not really offering any valuable reason for them to keep connected. Developing a blogging strategy that will supply quality content for your social media posts, is a great option that your followers will find valuable. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it is one of the most important aspects of having a great social media strategy.

When you’re posting things of value for your customers and potential customers, you'll notice a positive response. 

This takes us back to Brand Personality. If you're a brand that is constantly bragging about how great your business is and what services you offer, you'll notice people will become disinterested and maybe even annoyed, and they'll being to disengage. But, if your Brand Personality demonstrates a sense of helpfulness, and investment in your consumer base, to help them grow their business... the response you get will be far more positive. Social Media can be a great tool for initial, and continuing investment in relationships with customers and potential customers.  

YOU NEED TO POST OFTEN-ISH

Once you have started to build a network it's important to maintain a presence to maximize on the benefits of using social media as a marketing tool. Many companies have pages that are rarely updated, and are not valuable to people who follow them. You need to post often enough that people are connected but not annoyed.

This can be a tough balance to achieve. The proper amount of posting will depend on the network as well as your market. For example, posting 8x a day on twitter would be more than reasonable, but doing that on Facebook would be a big no-no.

You can do some research to find out statistically how often you can be posting on different forums. This will give you a starting point to measure from.

Social media is one of the greatest tools for marketing because it can really grow your business if used properly, without any big financial investment. If you’re already on social media and maybe haven't invested much time or thought into an effective social media strategy, don’t worry... you can always re-invent your company's profile through implementing some of the best practices we talked about in this blog.