It’s 2016, and I think we now all get the message: social media is a key tool for business. This does not just apply to larger companies that can afford to put millions of pounds into social media campaigns; it applies to the smaller businesses too. In this article we will be looking at how to use social media for small and local businesses in particular. This is a continuation from our recent blog post about where to begin when implementing social media marketing into your online strategy.
Let’s start off with content.
As a small business, it is especially important for you to convey your message and increase brand awareness to get where you hope to be in the future. You may feel that your social activity will be overshadowed by larger more prominent users but if customers can see your vision and like it, they may want to get to you before everybody else does! Social media advertising is also a great way to get in front of your demographic and give you a surge of exposure.
You want to tailor your posts to suit each platform. What is the point in posting the same things on each platform? Don’t just put links to another platform’s posts. Each channel has a different audience in terms of interests, age range and times they are most active.
However you want to keep the same branding throughout all of your channels. Make sure that they all follow the same style. Follow your logo’s colour scheme and design and make sure everything that you use as an advertising tool matches in a subtle way without being identical.
Give your company a voice. This will make you not only more approachable, but more honest looking. Do not turn to talking like a robot over social media out of fear that you will not look professional. It is fine to humanise your brand and give it a personality.
Use social media it to build links.
To put it simply, social networking sites provide an easy way to share and distribute your content. If it is seen by the right people, it can lead to new backlinks and authority for your brand.
Some examples of social networking channels which can lead to backlinks are:
Google+
There are many ways you can establish links on Google Plus if you know how to. For example you can use the ‘find people’ section and search with the ‘find co-workers’ function. In the ‘company name’ field, insert the name of a publication.
You can also use Google+ Circles to organize and segment outreach lists so the right content is going to the right people.
A favourite of ours! With Twitter you can easily find subject matter influencers and their associated websites. Once you know your prospects, you can organize them using Twitter Lists. There are multiple apps and tools which can really get the most out of Twitter as a link building strategy such as ‘Electoral’ and ‘All My Tweets’. Keep an eye out in our Recent Blog posts for an upcoming complete guide on using Twitter for link building!
YouTube
Linking to video content is great and can really engage an audience, but small businesses should be careful to not depend on YouTube for their entire online strategy.
The danger of doing this is that Youtube.com earns all the backlinks for your video content rather than your company’s website. If you are a small business owner you need all the backlinks you can get. A service like Wistia is a YouTube alternative which allows you to control embedding so that people link to your website instead of to YouTube.
If you are set using YouTube, you can still use that video content to build links through this process:
- Take a video that has been successful on YouTube, put the YouTube.com URL into a backlink checker like Majestic, Ahrefs, or Moz’s Open Site Explorer and get a list of websites linking to it.
- You can reach out to these websites and ask them to link to your company website as well as the YouTube.com link.
- OR you can access your company’s YouTube Analytics. “Traffic Sources” will show you any websites that embedded the video. You can also reach out to those websites and request a link to your company website.
- If you have created a video with the aim that it will drive leads, embed it on your website and encourage your social following to visit your website to watch it.
Those are the free options available at present, which may be more suited to companies with no budget for social media as part of their strategy. If you do have a little money to spend on Social Media Marketing then paid social ads can really get you in front of the right users! For example, you can use Facebook ads and target people by their workplace.
What do you think of our tips, were they helpful? Let us know on Twitter where we also post helpful information regarding PPC, SEO, digital marketing and social media!