If you’ve established social media pages but aren’t doing anything with them, you’re wasting so many valuable opportunities to connect with your target audience. This includes your clients, and even your prospects who decide to seek out more information about you.
To many small business owners, especially those in the arena of serving other businesses, social media seems like a waste of time. You’re not selling a brand new, up-and-coming consumer product, you’re a managed service provider trying to sell businesses various IT-related services to other business. So, what’s the point of trying to compete for attention in online spaces filled with baby pictures, memes, and funny animal videos? Why should you even bother?
LinkedIn is a place where prospects can learn about your company through a social network that is designed for business professionals. It’s a place where your current clients often expect professional updates from. And, it’s a place where potential future employees are searching for employment.
Recently, we have been sharing insights on some best practices regarding social media. This time, we’re going to discuss the primary function of social media: engagement.
Social media marketing, like all marketing, requires repeat viewings to enter the consciousness and equally important the subconscious of the audience. This is why there is the “Rule of 7” - the long-held belief that a potential customer needs to see your ad at least seven times before they are willing to commit to an action. Yes, there are impulse buyers, but they are the exception, not the rule. Most people take some time before they commit to a course of action and successful marketing demands you ‘touch’ them multiple times to reinforce your message.
I’m sure you’ve been to dinners with friends and family whom you haven’t seen in a long time, and EVERYONE, young and old, is glued to their cell phones and not really fully present. Instead, they’re busy taking pictures of their food, shooting short video snippets, and snapping pictures of the event - all for social media.
You’ve probably heard of the many benefits that social media can provide for your company. But, despite your best efforts, you’re struggling to receive those benefits. To your knowledge, you’re already posting the right things, at the right times, on the right channels. No matter what you do, you just can’t seem to get more people to follow your pages.
One of the things that is great about social media is that it is free for your business to use. However, as a company in the B2B space, you’re greatly limiting the success of your company if you don’t consider utilizing some of the paid aspects of these platforms. One way to get started is to consider promoting, or ‘boosting’, the posts you are already doing.
Recently, we wrote about where to begin when starting to market your company in our blog Kickstart Your Marketing Efforts Using These Strategies. One of the things we suggested you should do first is to develop a social media presence. 96% of small business owners use social media marketing and believe it is important to their business. This means you should, too. What platforms should you use? What should you be posting? How do you grow your follower count? How should you be managing all of the channels you are on? These questions are easier to answer than you think.
Social media is more than just an excellent outlet for your marketing--it can also deliver highly valuable metrics that bring you valuable insights and information. You just need to know where to look for these metrics. In this blog, we’ve compiled the social media metrics that we feel could be the most helpful to your marketing.
Most of you have probably heard of Facebook Live, or even seen that someone on your personal Facebook news feed ‘is live’. When Facebook first introduced their Live post option, pretty much everyone in your newsfeed that went Live was alerted to you by a notification. Since its introduction, there are fewer notifications about those who go Live on Facebook, but there is still a considerable amount of buzz surrounding Facebook Live.
Have you ever wondered how some companies do so well on social media? Are you trying to decipher their recipe for success? We’ve done the research and we’ve found some of the best tips and tricks for B2Bs on social media.
Contrary to popular belief, Social Media is a place for more than just B2C businesses! How much of your business depends on referrals, and word-of-mouth marketing? Quite a bit? Social media marketing is essentially word-of-mouth marketing just multiplied by 3.2M (give or take a few).
As business currently stands, each and every company (including those who provide managed services to others) need to be actively engaged in marketing efforts. Without these efforts, prospects are simply unlikely to progress to be the clients a business needs. There are tools, however, that an MSP may use to lead a prospect through what is known as the marketing funnel, or the progression of initiatives that help nudge a prospect to become a lead, and from there a client.
Have you ever been set up on blind date or gone on a first date where you didn’t know the person all that well? If so, you understand all the anxiety that it can cause. Figuring out what to wear, what to say and what to do can really stress you out and so can managing your company's social media accounts. What to post, what to like and what to share while still managing your company’s personality and authenticity while striving to become the thought leader in your area, can also cause anxiety for some. How do you minimize that anxiety on a first/blind date? Make it a group date - invite your friends and have them invite theirs. How do you minimize that anxiety when it comes to your social media? Share, retweet or repost other companies’ social media - as long as you have a method to your madness.
Hashtags: they’re everywhere. Television shows dot episodes with a stream of hashtags for viewers to use on their social media accounts. During commercial breaks, everything from political spots, to advertisements, to promos for new episodes come emblazoned with hashtags.
If you feel as if your company is not reaching out to your desired target audience or even that you are not getting adequate reaction and/or responses, then it is time to showcase your company to the over 400 million monthly active users of Instagram. In six short years, Instagram has overthrown Facebook and Twitter’s reign on social media communications. Instagram is not to be taken as a passing fad, as it has reached a global phenomenon status.
Social Media is an important part of any marketing strategy. Whether you choose to blog, post upcoming events, ideas, company related stories or pay for advertising through these social media outlets, you’re doing your company a favor. Social media is EVERYWHERE and the people that use it are checking it a lot! But how do you know if you are utilizing the different platforms to their full potential? And with so many platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, how do you know how to keep track of them all to make sure they’re working for you?
One thing that it is a good idea to consider when thinking about the 'value' of social media marketing is that it doesn’t work like this: Social Media Post → Lead → Sale → Calculate ROI of the Post
When it comes to a company’s social media pages, every follower and “like” is valuable. Essentially, your social media followers are the ones who will most frequently see your marketing content. Therefore, when formulating your social media marketing strategy, you need to keep in mind their expectations, or else risk losing them.
