Back in 2016, we brought you The Ultimate Guide to Social Media for Small Businesses & Freelancers! But you know as well as I do, the social media scene is constantly changing.
This is why we decided it was time to source some more current advice on how to leverage social media for your business.
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Read on to gain some great new morsels of wisdom from these experts’ minds. They’ve been there, done that, experimented endlessly to find what works and are kindly willing to share.
So make like a sponge and start absorbing and implementing!
Michael Anderson, Marketing Specialist at “GeoJango Maps”
One way that we use social media to expedite growth is by strategically advertising our blog posts on Facebook. Since Facebook users have little to no commercial intent while using the platform, we find that promoting creative content is the best way to attract users to our website and prevent them from bouncing.
Advertising a quality blog post to a relevant audience generally yields a high click through rate, a low cost per click, and a long average session duration. Then at the end of every blog post we promote our business and our products in a way that ties back into the article.
This strategy is aimed to turn cold leads into warm leads through a free offering such as a well-written travel article. I’ve found this to be good for building brand awareness, increasing Facebook engagement, increasing average session duration, and decreasing bounce rate.
Steve Toth, Marketing Manager at “Car Pages”
One small, but effective thing we done to generate more leads was to check complaints against competitors or local businesses in the same niche.
We don’t comment on a customer’s complaint on Facebook or Twitter, but we do like the post/tweet. The person doesn’t have many notifications so they will notice us or our clients like. Then seeing we are in the same niche, more often and not they will check out our website.
Obviously they are currently not happy with the service they are getting, and are much more likely to source alternatives. And even if their complaint is resolved, they have been made aware of us for next time.
We’d never bad mouth a competitor, that is poor form, but a subtle like can and does do wonders. Important that companies track new customers sources, to see how effective this tactic is.
So not only do we get a few more visits, they are warm leads that have either bought a similar product/service or at least have expressed an interest in this.
We’d take a few qualified leads over a 100 clickbait leads any day
Carsten Schaefer, Founder and CEO of “Crowdy.ai”
One thing that really worked for us is to connect with our users in person. We had a closed beta program before we launched our app and about 100 people signed up. We connected with each of them on Twitter and from time to time, we asked them through DMs about how they were going with our product.
We wanted to learn what we did right in the beta and what needs fixing. Surprisingly enough, a lot of them reached back and gave us the feedback that we needed.
Instead of going through traditional channels (such as email), we went to social media to ask them what we could do better. I guess that because of the medium, they thought that our plea was more sincere. As a result, we got valuable feedback that helped us improve our product before the launch.
Those users are still with us and we made sure to let them know every time their feedback was applied.
Michael Stahl, Executive VP of “HealthMarkets”
healthmarkets.com | 
Social media has provided our company and our thousands of agents throughout the United States with one more way to stay in touch with our existing customers and reach new customers.
In addition to paid ads, we have many agents who utilize Facebook to share relevant information about our products and services, which has prompted existing customers to recommend those agents to others they know. It’s a win-win referral strategy and also allows our agents to maintain connections with their existing customers.
From a corporate standpoint, social media helps us further differentiate our brand and promote the products and services we provide, whether it’s via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other channels.
Jonathan Aufray, Co-founder and CEO of “Growth Hackers”
growth-hackers.net |
Because we are B2B, we work a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter. These are the 2 best social media platforms for B2B. We automate our social media posting, What we do is creating our own content as well as curating content from others.
Curating content is as important as creating new one. Why? Because it shows that you’re interested in your industry and this way you can become a thought leader within your niche. Not only we create, curate and share content, we also engage with our community by messaging them, asking them questions, commenting on their posts, etc.
By doing this, we improve our brand awareness, drive traffic, get leads and make sales.
Daniel Ku, Director of Marketing at “PostBeyond”
Alongside marketing purposes, social media usage can be taken one step further in business – by creating a strategy encouraging employees to share company content on their personal social media, in order to represent your business in a more engaging and authentic way online.
A recent survey found that 67% of people considered their friends to be a reliable source of information on social media. That considered, if done correctly, your employees will help your business increase brand awareness whilst impacting sales, too.
If your brand is regularly being positively communicated through the unbiased voices of your employees online, and prospective clients and customers see this, they will be more inclined to collaborate and join forces..
Encouraging employees to share information related to your organisation on their personal social media platforms demonstrates the value you place on them – however, there is also potential risks that businesses need to plan ahead for.
As content and information about your company will be shared through employees’ social media, it’s beneficial to have guidelines in place so that both employer and employee are on the same page.
Louis Watton, Marketing Executive at “Shiply”
One of the most useful aspects of Twitter is how current all discussions are. You can harness recent news and discussions for your business to generate views around your profile and subsequently drive traffic to your site.
By contributing to relevant discussions around your industry and reacting to news you make sure that not only are you a constant presence in these types of conversations but also that people can come to your profile for a hot take.
Through Facebook you tend to find that content which prompts people to tag their friends is a great way of generating a following and increasing potential website traffic. The single easiest way to create this content is simply a funny or intriguing image with a caption encouraging shares along the lines of ‘tag a friend who would do this’.
It may seem like clickbait (and it is) but it generates a lot of activity around your profile, which gets your site in front of potential visitors, and best of all it only takes 5 minutes
Linda Formichelli, Founder of “Hero’s Journey Content”
There are two ways we’ve been using social media to grow.
- We work one platform.
Instead of scattering our attention on every social media platform, we chose the one that would work best for us and we’re working it. For us, that platform is LinkedIn. Despite what the experts say, we feel it’s better to do a great job on one platform than to do a “meh” job on all of them.
- We post social proof.
While we do a lot of things on LinkedIn, from reaching out to prospects to running ads, I think the best marketing tactic for us has been to create “welcome new client” and “welcome back/returning client” images that we post when we get a new client or when one enters into a new contract with us.
When we post one of these, we also include a message about the client and how glad we are to work with them.
This serves two purposes: Not only does it give the client a nice shout-out, it’s also a form of “social proof.” It shows that businesses are hiring us—and that happy clients are coming back for more. This reduces the perception of risk in hiring us, because it can be scary to trust your content to someone you don’t know!
Vivek Chugh, Founder and CEO of “Listables”
We have taken advantage of social media by making it a large part of our customer acquisition strategy. The two main strategies we use are influencer marketing and paid social ads. Using these strategies we have grown by 250% year over year.
We are a productivity service that helps enterprise and personal users build interactive checklists for all sorts of tasks, and goals. To grow the personal user base we have primarily utilized influencer marketing…
To do this we find Instagram influencers ranging in topics from finance, to motivation, to humor, and others and have them post a popular checklist, like our 52-week money saving challenge checklist. We post with a short caption explaining the checklist and a tag to our page, and it has been very successful at acquiring users.
In addition, to increase engagement we use re-targeting marketing across Facebook and Instagram. We promote checklists from our service to previous visitors and current users. This has helped our branding and awareness tremendously as well as to increase user engagement.
James Pollard, “The Adviser Coach”
theadvisorcoach.com |
As someone who works exclusively with financial advisers and financial service professionals, LinkedIn is a gold mine for me. I am using Linked-In by using its groups feature and direct outreach specifically to financial advisers.
The best part about Linked In is that people list their occupation in the headline of their profile. So, for example, if you’re targeting teachers, you can go to Linked-In and search for teachers and people will literally have that in their headline if they’re teachers, meaning they are there for you to talk to them and for you to network with them.
After all, LinkedIn is a professional networking website.
Heidi Brown, Founder of “Brilliance by Brown, Inc”
brilliancebybrown.com | 
Prior to the founding of this business, I have held senior marketing management positions at both startup and marquee brand organizations in the technology sector.That said, social media has helped to collapse the time and tactics required to effect top line sales, augment brand awareness and customer engagement.
As an integrated marketing mechanism, I have and continue to utilize it as a means to augment brand building in a more granular way; drive better communication with the customer-base through “immediate” interaction; monitor the brand, products and services impact in the marketplace and respond more quickly; monitor competitors in a more dynamic way, and foster greater direct to consumer relationships for brand loyalty.
It is important to underscore that social media platforms need to be curated based upon the type of business. As an example, LinkedIn and Twitter are more effective tools for a B2B play. For B2C, while LinkedIn and Twitter may be beneficial, a Facebook page or group, Instagram and Pinterest tend to be more impactful.
Also, the content per social media platform may vary while being consistent with the company’s overall messaging and positioning.