Making Social Media Work

For the past several years I have helped small businesses and organizations create their social mediapresence.  Many times after following up with them, they explained that they are not getting the return on investment that wanted.  They actively update their pages, but they just do not see the enormous amount of interaction with their fans/followers as they had hoped for.

The one thing many people do not realize is that the ubiquitous nature of social media makes it even harder to stand-out among the rest.  However, it is in our human nature to know that the things we are doing are worthwhile.  Business owners need to know that they satisfy their customer’s needs or the experiences their customers have while doing business with them.  

If your reading this and saying, “yes that is me”, we need to change your way of thinking.  The way we make social media work is not by putting a single post out once a week, but through engagement and strategy.  

Engagement:

Engaging your customers through social media is probably the single most important component to making social media work for your organization.  Think about your organization and what you do when someone walks in the door and asks you a question.  Using those same principles, think of it in context of social media.  Most of the time it translates.  

Secondly, think about the content you are posting.  Is it always text posts about your business?  If so change it up.  Try uploading photos of fun things happening in your business.  Maybe a customer took a photo of your store, have them post it on to social media site.  You can also share videos, ask questions or share web links to try to spur conversation among your audience.

Lastly, use your social media page as a promotional tool.  Put coupons on your page or incentives for liking or following you. Have your current followers share these promotions with their followers and so on.  This would be a great way use social media to expand your customer-base.

Strategy

As an organization creating a new social media site, many organizations think that being on every social network is going to help them gain the publicity they desire.  However, this is not alway the case.  Working with smaller organizations, it is obvious many business owners have very little time to devote towards social media.  So as you begin formulating your social media plans, think about these questions:

• Which social media tool am I most comfortable with?  Is it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
• Where am I going to be able to capture my audience?  If you know a large majority of your customers are on Twitter, you should try to connect with them on Twitter.
• How often are you going to post on the site?
• What type of content are you going to post?
• What features can I use within the social media tool to my advantage? 
• How are you going to measure the success of your social media presence? (Facebook Insights, Hootsuite, Hubspot, Google Analytics…)

My philosophy as a trainer is that it takes time to learn new things, and for many individuals it is not always going to happen right away.  So I always tell people to take baby steps.  Build a strategy for one network, execute it and master it.  Once you are at a point where you feel comfortable, try taking another step.  In the end, remember to engage your followers and develop a strategy to do so.

Written By: Mike Shaffer