Marketing Expert: Lori Lyons
Social Media – the beast every business owner loves to hate.
There are over 65 different social media platforms available for business owners. So no wonder it’s frustrating and confusing to figure out just where your business belongs! A successful social media strategy is important in today’s world. But how to go about it and why should you?
“Comments, likes, even dislikes are good – it means your audience is moved in some way to engage with your posts.”
Overall, There Are 5 Main Purposes For Social Media:
1 – To Build Your Brand:
Social media is great for brand awareness and it’s probably one of the most important aspects of using social media. Building your brand means establishing, building, and maintaining the “know, like and trust” factor that is the foundation of your brand. Successful activity shows your ideal client what it would be like to work with you. What you believe in, what you value and your expertise. It also keeps your brand top of mind with engaging and consistent posts.
2 – To Engage With Your Audience:
“Engage” is the keyword here. One-on-one conversations can be had with your audience and ideal client. Active, involved followers is a much better metric than just simply “followers” that are simply a vanity number. Comments, likes, even dislikes are good – it means your audience is moved in some way to engage with your posts.
3 – To Help Your SEO:
Social media is just one strategy in an overall digital plan. Ideally, social media activity will drive traffic to your website. Which will increase and boost your SEO or search engine optimization.
4 – To Grow Your Email List:
Social media is an excellent way to send your ideal client to a list-building lead magnet. (See my November article on Email list building) Including links in your bios and posts will encourage your ideal clients to click through and request your lead magnet. Give value here and be sure to ask for engagement!
5 – To Add To Your Bottom Line:
Let’s face it, we are in business to make money and the time we put into social media should not be any different. The goal of social media is to make money. It takes a lot of time and resources to effectively utilize social media and the outcome – at the end of the day – should be revenue. Otherwise, why spend the time?
“Keep in mind, we are only talking about business social media.“
Target Your Business Social Strategy:
Social media strategy is such an integral part of a marketing plan that sometimes the end goal is overlooked. We are in business to make a profit otherwise we own a hobby. It is easy to overlook the profit part of social media marketing when you are posting fun videos, memes or snapshots of your business day. Keep in mind, we are only talking about business social media. Cute photos of your family or the neat restaurant you visited last night are not what we are talking about. We are specifically targeting your business social strategy. (Caveat and small rabbit hole – for some smaller businesses, they do utilize their personal pages for their businesses. This is not a good strategy and will be an upcoming article on the reasons why.)
Identify The Platform:
The number one key to starting to develop a social media strategy is to identify where your ideal client “hangs out”. Each platform has specific purposes and ideal clients that hang out in them. The pressure to post on all platforms can be overwhelming. How many times have you heard of great success on a platform and feel you “must’ start promoting on that platform? The problem with this strategy is that it may not be where your ideal client is hanging out so you’ve wasted time and energy on that platform. A simple google search of demographics on the various platforms is a great place to start to identify the platform that will bring you the most success.
“The really successful influencers – that run their social media as their businesses – spend a great deal of time engaging with their followers.”
Engagement Is The Key:
The second key to a successful strategy is to focus on engagement, not followers. As briefly mentioned above, followers are mainly vanity numbers and are not as important to most of us as they were in years previous. It’s a totally different story of course for the world of influencers where numbers do count, but so does engagement within the followers. The really successful influencers – that run their social media as their businesses – spend a great deal of time engaging with their followers. Engagements are the vanity metrics to follow here!
Social Media Can Grow Your Business:
To find out about engagement is actually very simple. Scroll through someone’s feed and look at the number of comments, likes, emojis and such on a post. Check to see if it is a variety of different people commenting or the same ones. Dislikes are actually okay because it can encourage discussion. It’s always interesting to observe or participate in a meaningful conversation where the opinions differ. Polite discourse can grow engagement and interest, and while challenging at times to control, it’s an effective way to organically grow a social media platform.
Used effectively, with planning and forethought, social media can absolutely grow your business, increase your profits and be a terrific tool for your brand. Comment below on how you use social media to grow your business. Let us know what platforms best serve your business!
About the Author:
Lori is America’s Midlife Marketing Maven helping GenXBoomers take the frustration and mystery out of marketing their businesses. She owns a digital marketing agency,and specializes in website design, branding and marketing strategy. She loves teaching Encore Entrepreneurs how to grow their businesses so they can concentrate on following THEIR passions and THEIR clients. Lori thinks there is nothing better than seeing someone’s eyes light up when they “get it” and then they take it and make money, easily and simply and without the stress they had before.
Lori will be launching her podcast, The Encore Entrepreneur Podcast this summer where she will be interviewing entrepreneurs and talking about how they market their businesses and the tools and techniques they use. She lives in Atlanta with her husband of almost 30 years and helps her 22 year old entrepreneur son with his marketing. She is a sports fanatic and loves her Atlanta Braves baseball!
