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Social media

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Social media helps you extend your reach and create strong personal bonds…

What’s a great way to build enthusiasm among your audiences about doing business with you? And how can you also clearly show your business’s track record of innovation and responsiveness?

Social media makes it easy for your business to do some very useful things:

• Create a central hub that demonstrates your business success over time
• Provide a focal point for your business audiences to interact with you
• Maintain open lines of communication with willing, attentive followers

Indeed, your posts on social media are like adverts to an ultra-opted-in audience, as they’ve actually chosen to follow your business.

However, you first need to build that audience. Also, you can’t guarantee they’ll always be listening. And, actually, you can achieve something far more important through social media anyway.

Because, at its best, social media can amplify messages from your people through the social power of their networks, taking your brand with them. You can reach further – through friends, friends of friends, and their networks – helping make your business message seem more like a personal recommendation.

But getting to that stage almost always takes time, patience and concerted effort. You also need to have a realistic understanding of social media.

Build your audiences through personal engagement…

The rules of business haven’t changed just because of social media. The fact is that people are still primarily interested in other people.

So most of the people that choose to follow your business page on social media will be attracted to it by first connecting with one of your employees. And if someone chooses to follow your business of their own accord, you should get an appropriate employee to engage with them personally straight away.

Target your audiences effectively…

Just as with all your other online promotional activities, you need to have a clear strategic view of what you’re aiming to achieve.

Think about who exactly is involved in your potential customers’ buying journeys. Then create personas for the key roles that you’re aiming to talk to and decide what you want to say to them.

Those personas should guide who you target, and which of your employees are most appropriate to reach out and connect in each case.

Forget social media platforms that aren’t relevant…

Moreover, those personas and the nature of your business should also guide which social media platforms you invest time in. For example, if your offering is pure business-to-business, targeting people with some specialist knowledge, Facebook and Instagram are probably not for you.

Build personal relationships by being relevant…

Social media – above all – is social. You wouldn’t start a conversation with a new acquaintance by reading them your latest business announcement. You first ask about them and find out what they’re interested in.

Yet, social media platforms aren’t really set up for that – they’re all about central broadcast. And it’s OK to make announcements from your business account. Just don’t expect them to drive much engagement.

The way to do that is through building personal relationships. So your employees, as part of their roles, should get into the habit of resharing your corporate posts with their own audiences. But they should add commentary to make those posts more relevant.

Your people should also make additional posts that address likely areas of interest for their audiences. But these should not just be adverts or pitches. Their primary objective should be to create a human connection – and build respect – with the people that might see them.

Become popular by showing some personality…

Social media is truly about personality and popularity. (What else? It’s ‘social’.) People like to do business with people they like. So that’s actually what you’re primarily aiming to achieve – differentiation through affiliation.

(Although, yes, you are also still aiming to reinforce that your business is best placed to address your customers’ challenges too, wherever possible.)

So how can your employees show genuine affinity with your customers’ concerns? What are the people that you’re targeting worried about? How can you show them that your people really personally care?

And how can you empower your employees to achieve all that, while keeping the message upbeat and consistent?

Extend your reach by ‘going viral’…

Moreover, how can you frame your messages so that people will respond? The real strength of social media is that the more attention (i.e. likes and shares) your posts get, the further they travel.

So what can your people say that will provoke an emotional response from their audiences, getting them to share your messages and add their own comments? Because that’s what will make social media really worthwhile for your business.

Never forget…

You should take care to ensure that your business’s personal social media engagement is driven primarily by senior people who are unlikely to leave. Done well over time, social media accounts can become highly valuable, so you don’t want that bank of goodwill to move to a competitor.

Moreover, remember that the various social media platforms are primarily focused on their own profits, not yours. Some of the marketing tools and shortcuts they provide work as if they’re designed to keep you on a merry-go-round of activity rather than actually succeed.

Free your mind to focus on real work…

Up-Word can help you devise a targeted social media strategy that’s right for your business, and create compelling posts that your people can feed in to their networks over time.

Schedule a free, no-obligation call…

Have an informal chat about your objectives and find out more about how you can benefit.

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