As a small business owner, it’s important to keep essential aspects of your operation in-house whenever possible, logical, and cost effective. Social media outreach is one element more and more small business owners feel comfortable handling themselves.
But whether you’re taking on the responsibilities yourself or delegating them to other members of your team, it’s important to keep your strategy simple and straight forward.
But be warned, simple doesn’t mean easy. Irregular, haphazard, or lazy social media efforts will not be rewarded. Don’t waste your own time. Take your strategy seriously, and be consistent.
Below are a few basic guidelines to help you carve out a simple and effective social media presence. Keep your strategy limited to just a few key points, so that you can maintain focus.
Tell Your Story
Telling a compelling origin story or branding story to help ground and personify your business. Letting your customers know where you’re coming from and where you’re moving to (through narrative) will make your company more approachable, more trustworthy.
Engage with Content not Product
Content creation is the easiest way to keep your Fans interest. Here are a few rules of thumb:
- Quality over Quantity (no more than one Facebook post every three to four hours, use Twitter and other avenues for more rapid fire engagement)
- Less sales speak, more content marketing (offer useful information to your readers and they will come back for more; you’re sharing and teaching first, selling second)
- Less self-promotion, more engagement (limit half of your Facebook activity to promoting your own content and products, and focus the rest of your time and energy on facilitating discussions and responding to other people’s posts)
Be Deliberate
Whether you’re selling or engaging, your calls to action need to be purposeful. Think about this when designing your Facebook page and planning your outreach strategy.
Organize your goals: first and foremost you want to grow your Fan-base, secondly you want keep them engaged and interested with relevant content, coupons, and contests, and finally, you want to eventually make a sale.
To do all this your Facebook page needs to be simply designed (less clutter, so your brand shines through), the calls to action (Like this, read this, share this, etc) need to be apparent and easy to follow, and your content needs be consistent and compelling.
This guest post is by Brooks Hays, content creator and Customer Bliss Officer at Hy.ly. It’s a social media software company that offers its clients do-it-yourself Tab Building tools, so they can customize their own Facebook pages, get prospect, leads, and customers, all without outsourced assistance.
Social media is such a complex platform, that any suggestions on how to tackle it has to advocate simplification. Engaging with content is indeed a great practice, as it places emphasis on service, and not self-promotion.
Learned a lot from this article. Promoting the discussion IS much better than a business constantly talking about their products.
Great advice. All too often, business owners feel as though they have to be everything to everyone. They create a Facebook fan page, Twitter profile, blog, etc. because they believe it’s a cheap way to reach thousands of potential customers. But once they create their social presence, they miss out on opportunities to actively engage their audience–to reply to comments. To ask questions. And when they do, they miss the chance to use those platforms for the sole purpose for which they were intended–to develop meaningful connections.
When I work with small businesses, I ask them a few questions to help guide their social strategy http://shawngraham.me/index.php/blog/the-small-business-social-media-readiness-quiz.