It should be… it is a shame if your business has a great service or product: everyone should at least have a chance to see what you are doing.
Many businesses struggle with the time and energy to put into social media. If there is a lack of response, many just give up. But your competition are very likely to be on there, and social media platforms have become marketing giants, offering a mostly free way to reach your customers, to increase brand awareness, and generate leads. It is about engagement with your audience, adding value and trust.
To understand how social media can work for you, it is important to understand that all customers have a buying cycle:
Awareness
– are customers aware of your business?
Consideration
– have they ever considered you business, or even considered the product your business offers?
Decision
– who will they buy from?
So if a business is actively engaging with their customers, adding value to their day and making them smile, they are more likely to gain a potential customers trust, thereby influencing the decision in the buying process.
Once you have decided to take the plunge, you need to decide which platforms are right for your company. Facebook and Twitter are great for all types of business, whereas Pinterest is more niche. Instagram is all about the image, and invoking an immediate response. Once you have decided on which platforms, get them set up in house, or you can consider out sourcing. Top tips when setting up are: For Facebook make sure your business is verified by social media platforms. This will ensure you gain maximum reach as a business and is very easy to do. Also you should be following all of your past customers, potential customers and your competition, it is a great opportunity to reach their customers too. For Twitter, come up with a tag line for your business and use it with your hashtags, which help your tweets show up more easily in news feeds. Decide on your tone, you only have 140 characters on twitter, so will you be business based, or chatty and amusing? Think carefully about which images you will use for any of your home pages, a picture paints a thousand words.
Most important of all, once you start posting regularly make sure someone is monitoring your accounts, because an unanswered comment is as bad as not answering the phone. You wouldn’t leave an email from a customer unanswered, and the same should apply with any contact via social media.
“Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.” ― Kevin Stirtz
Join in with networking groups, and post helpful, useful, interesting content. Include a call to action that encourages further engagement, website clicks and interaction. Work your business to success.