Growing a social media following is important. It can mean the difference between life and death for your business. A Facebook page is a good example – On my business page, I share a lot of my blog posts. Blog posts are useful because they get people invested in your company, and if you don’t have a social media following, you’re relying completely on your website’s SEO. I can help you learn SEO in a few hours with this post. – But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re talking social media, and believe it or not, social sites getting good reactions on content and sharing it will also help your SEO.
Facebook pages can be used to develop a social media following that can change the life of your business. Whilst advertising on Facebook is much less lucrative than it was in the early days, it can still be good to invest in a following of a few hundred people that like your business. These people will see the content you post, and if, like me, you’re an avid blogger, it’s your bread and butter of making your advertising strategy count, getting seen online and increasing the people visiting your business website. The more people doing this, the more likely you are to get customers for goods and services.
If you have built up an audience on social media, every time you have an offer, or a product you want to put out to your customers, you can share your website’s posts, or a picture with the offer in it to the people who follow you, and it will get your product out there. Organic reach is a lot lower than it used to be, so sharing these things on social media will not be as effective as they once were, however it can still make a difference in the traffic to your website and the amount you are selling, so it’s always worthwhile to make the time.
In my experience marketing for restaurants, I have found that the amount of customers that come in and visit usually increases on days where I share offers, and that pictures tend to get nice reactions increasing overall reach. So with social media, if you’re getting good interactions with one post, it’s going to affect a wider audience.
Growing Your Social Media:
When growing your social media, you have to keep several things in mind if you want to grow it effectively and ensure that you keep the right audience. You should never invest in paying for social media followers through dodgy websites, as this will fill your page with bots and render any advertising next to useless in the future as it will mess with Facebook’s advertising algorithms. Yes your business may have 100,000 followers, but if no one is looking at your posts and your entire reach is dead, you’ve just killed your page and paid to do it. Be really careful about doing anything off platform like this, as anything that sounds too good to be true, usually is.
You are Your Ideals:
People like your page for a reason, and they follow you because they’re interested in your company, it’s doctrine and what you do. You have to ensure at every step of your journey that you keep things professional and company related. I have lost count of the amount of my clients who have ended up in heated political debates with customers, or have had angry rants at customers who are complaining about something which may be either party’s fault. You cannot get involved in that, as it will only hurt business. You should share things that will either benefit your business, support your business ideal.
What Will Work For You:
- Posts about your business and business ideology.
- Posts about business products.
- Pictures to do with your products and services.
- Quotes that fit into your niche.
- Pictures of your staff working. (With their consent of course!)
- Posts about fellow related businesses you get products from to support them, don’t forget to tag their Facebook pages! (These show you’re supportive and will help get you support from these businesses!)
- Posts about charities you support. (These help you look good!)
What Will Not Work For You:
- Cute Cat/Dog/Pet Pictures. (Popular for sharing, but nothing to do with business.)
- Positivity Quotes. (If you aren’t running a positivity business, these mean nothing and help no one. They’ll get shared but they won’t get you customers.)
- Posts or Comments that are antagonistic towards individuals or groups. (This can lead to your audience infighting. Not good.)
- Politics, Religion and Sex. (These are not part of polite conversation, and will usually end up with problems.)
You want to ensure that you remain as neutral as possible as any big issues can lead to your audience abandoning you or attacking each other. People who are disgruntled, you should contact privately and be as cordial as possible, even if what they are saying is grossly unfair. Communication tends to solve problems and it helps your company look better than someone sharing an argument you’ve had online. This can bring all sorts of trolls, and trolls have a habit of being nasty, vindictive and unrelenting. It’s better to avoid toxicity.
Keep your online profiles up to date:
It’s pointless to have a collection of social media accounts if you’re not going to use them. Due to the increasing number of individuals who are now online and use the internet on a regular basis, social media has become the most convenient approach to engage with your customers on a wide scale. But how would those potential consumers know you’re still in business if they discover you’re not active online and haven’t posted since you set the accounts? There are numerous ways to accomplish this, but the following are the most important:
- Make sure your Profile Picture and Cover Photo are clear and identifiable so that potential clients can tell who you are and what you do in a matter of seconds. This will help ensure that people who choose to like your page are liking you for the right reasons and will ultimately help increase your engagement.
- Maintain a regular posting schedule on your social media accounts to keep your followers informed about your services and any upcoming promotions (another tip: On posts that you want to reach more people to see, add localised hashtags and send out your posts at a time where your target audience is going to on their social media eg. In the evening after work and during the lunch time period.)
- Maintaining communication with your customers is your responsibility. Keep an eye out for any messages on the page, and always engage with customers. Like their posts if they are supportive, and you may get followers that come to your page to support you time and time again!
- It’s extremely important to always pay attention to your consumers, especially when they have a complaint. Your company’s Facebook page will be graded based on how quickly you respond to messages or inquiries. The faster you are and the higher the rating you receive from your clients, the higher you will show in the Facebook search results. Many businesses will use a chatbot to achieve better results, however, I am of the opinion after using them for a long time that they are not an acceptable way of communicating directly with people and tend to frustrate them.
- Dealing with a challenging message in a short amount of time might be difficult, so make sure you have a list of prewritten responses to give to your clients to reassure them that their inquiry is important to you. These answers can be succinct and to-the-point, such as: “Hi, NAME.” Thank you for contacting us, providing comments, or informing us. Within the following few days, we’ll try to resolve this issue for you. We will call you as soon as possible to discuss the outcome.” This way you go to your notepad, copy the text, replace NAME with their name and send them the message.
If you use these suggestions, you’ll have a lot more success with social media.
