Social Media is by far the number one tool in your businesses arsenal.

But remember.

There is more to social media than just posting the odd picture on facebook and MANY benefits to your business.

BENEFIT 1 -INCREASE BRAND AWARENESS

The main advantage and easily the most important aspect of social media is improving, modifying and building up brand awareness for your business.

Having an active social profile not only increases your network (which is a significant plus on its own) but allows you to curate how your brand is perceived online.

Do you want your brand to be fun and a little wacky?
Skittles are a brand you need to look at, their twitter account (@Skittles) is a brilliant example of being able to showcase your product in different ways

Through the use of pictures and images, skittles are showing you that they are fun, there consistent with their message and trend higher due to them posting RELEVANT content at the right time.

Do you want to show you’re an expert in your industry?
This is something many businesses try to accomplish, and the easiest way to do this is through blogs and links to your website.
Oracle is a good example of how you can use LinkedIn to drive awareness while portraying you as the expert you are.

 

This is an excellent example because they are using emotion and storytelling to give you a feeling of their brand and that they are trying to accomplish.

Storytelling is one of the top ways to use content marketing to grow your brand (and is something you should be doing NOW)

Do you want to share your insights into a specific field?

Sport is a vast field (bad pun intended)
If you were to try and cover every sport in one page, it would be a mess.
Fans of Golf may not care about Boxing and vice versa.
So what do you do when your brand covers multiple areas?
It’s simple.
Your break the brand down!
Sky Sports is a good example of this.

They have broken down their sports page into a number of different pages that share content, so if you do want to know more you can learn!

By sharing these updates on the primary account, it reduces the risk of alienating a specific sports fan while not limiting your audience.

Online platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook allow you to target your perfect audience within a few minutes, rather than months of other more traditional marketing channels (Flyers, TV Adverts and Newspaper articles)

Social medias massive power comes from the ability to reach out to a lot of people, at once WHILE LETTING YOU TRACK IN REAL TIME what they are interacting and responding to.

Allowing you to tailor your brand to a specific subset of customers without alienating the unknown factor.

BENEFIT 2 – BUILD UP A POWERFUL PRESENCE

Building up your brand presence different to building up your brand, but there are similarities.

Engaging with customers doesn’t only lead to brand awareness and recognition, but communication is a must with maintaining a relationship with prospective customers which will improve your brand presence.

Making sure that you respond to everything on your Social Media
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE
Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, you need to acknowledge their issue politely!

The #1 thing you need to remember is the customer is always right!

Yes, this adage is still valid.

By being polite to rude and complaining customers, this gives your other prospects the opportunity to see how you deal with adversity.

If you ignore or respond poorly to criticism, people won’t want to work with you.

Checking out what other people think about your product is how the majority of customers decide what their next purchase will be.

By handling a question or complaint the right way, you can move someone from on the fence to a ready and waiting prospect.

 

BENEFIT 3 THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

There’s more to social media then selling (although this is an integral part of it)
Like handling complaints, you need to be there.

Being attentive and engaging with customers improves your brand.

From answering questions to asking them, you need to remember something

IT’S CALLED SOCIAL MEDIA

If you do not speak to your audience as people, you’re missing out on potential customers!

This is a wonderful example of how to ask questions and get your customers feedback.

Ir promotes engagement, and while it is only showing other Hilton resorts, 99% of people who reply won’t be able to go to any of them.

HOWEVER

They are talking about the hotel and what they like about it.

Now how many of their friends will see this?

A LOT

If you take nothing else from this, make sure you actively talk to your audience and if they ask a question or comment on your brand reply!

KitKat does this superbly in this example

REMEMBER
DO THIS ON EVERY PLATFORM

BENEFIT 4 – CROSS PLATFORM PROMOTION

The power (and danger) of social media is you can use it to say anything!
To promote every aspect of your business.
And that’s where you’ve got to be careful.
One thing you have to make sure is to don’t flood your social channels with just “buy from me” messages, give them a reason to engage with you, from sharing blogs and videos to articles you’ve found interesting.

Once you’ve decided on what you’re going to say (using your marketing plan), you can start to promote your other platforms!

Have you got a massive Twitter following but only ten fans on facebook?

ASK YOU TWITTER FOLLOWERS TO FOLLOW FACEBOOK!

Just don’t do this every other post, once or twice a week is more than enough!

Same is true for LinkedIn.

You’ve tailored your LinkedIn account to have your target audience, which is excellent but you want to speak to them using different content or showcase a different product.

What can you do?

Ask!

Yes, it’s as simple as that.

You’ve heard the expression “ ask, and ye shall receive?”

It works on social media.

JUST DON’T SPAM

Or your brand will be damaged.

Another great way social media can help your brand is through a collection of data and information.
But remember if you’re using a landing page to gather emails and personal information such as addresses and phone numbers and you intend to use these or store them in a database, from May 25th in the EU you MUST make sure you’re saving this information in compliance with the GDPR.

Otherwise, there’s a chance you and your brand will be in trouble!