How To Utilise Social Media For Business

There are a variety of platforms to choose from and the more platforms you utilise, the better chance you have of reaching your target audience. Ever heard of the phrase, “don’t put your eggs in one basket”?

However, even though it’s a good idea to be present on multiple platforms, you need to do your research and make sure you are using the ones that your audience is using. For example, if your business is B2B, then LinkedIn would be the perfect platform to promote your work, whereas it wouldn’t be ideal for a B2C business, because LinkedIn is specifically designed for businesses and professionals to connect with one another and seek opportunities.

The main purpose of creating a business page on any social media platform, should be to create and grow brand awareness, by reaching and connecting with a wider audience online. Therefore, you want to be able to grow your following with relevant people and reach those that are likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

The four key ways to achieve this are:

1.Create unique and valuable content

Visuals that capture your audience’s attention are the first point of gaining any sort of opportunity to find prospects, whether that be still images or videos. Videos are a great way to provide information whilst keeping it interesting, but you need to be able to capture one’s interest within the first three seconds.

As well as enticing visuals, it’s important that your content provides some value to your target audience. If your audience feels they have learned or benefited from a post on your page, they will most likely react to it, share it or leave a comment. With this in mind, you should be creating a variety of content, including blogs, news, tips and inspiration, alongside your promotional material.

2. Post Regularly

It’s important to ensure you are posting regularly on your business pages, to make sure you are continuing to grow your reach. If you post daily, it is most likely that new relevant audiences will see your content, opposed to posting once or twice a week.

Just imagine you posted an update on a Monday, which a chunk of your audience have seen on their feed, but many have missed it. Now you have missed an opportunity for a larger portion of your audience to know you exist. However, you can make up for it by posting on Tuesday with the intention to reach others who may have missed your last post.

To put it simply, the more you post, the more attention you will attract, the more engagement you will receive, and gain followers.

3. Use Hashtags

Hashtags are an easy and effective way of making sure your content is being seen by relevant people. A lot of people will use hashtags to search for information they are looking for on social media, and if your content includes the right hashtags, it will likely be seen in their search results. Although hashtags are useful on many social media channels, there are some that prove the implementation of hashtags to be more beneficial than others. Instagram is by far the best for hashtags and allows you to use up to thirty.

However, there is no point in sticking any old hashtag within your content to gain followers. You must do your research to find the best ones for your business and use a variety, which can improve your reach. Using a combination of business, industry, audience interests and location specific hashtags, will get you better results.

4. Engage With Your Audience

The best and most authentic way of gaining more followers on social media, is to engage with followers and others relevant to your industry. It is important to dedicate some time towards not only responding to the comments left on your posts, but to like and comment on posts uploaded by your audience. This could be anything from a simple emoji, a complement to a piece of advice.

The best way to do this is to find posts through searching relevant hashtags, giving those hashtags a follow and then leaving a comment on their most highly ranked posts. Not only should you be engaging with potential leads, but you should engage with those who are in the same line of business, to make sure you are being seen by their followers too. Furthermore, leaving a piece of information that someone can benefit from, will leave a good impression on your viewers