Ask the experts! Josh Wardini is Community Manager at Webmastersjury, and shares his knowledge with us:
You have your website, you have set up your blog, and you have chosen one or two social media sites to share news about your business on. You are all set, right? Not quite yet, unfortunately. You are right about the website – businesses without websites in this modern era are viewed as less credible. That is great about the blog. Hopefully, you are sharing some useful info!
And, yes, you should have at least one social media page, so where is it that you are going wrong? Why don’t you see the kinds of results you would like? You have everything in place.
Okay, you may have everything in place. And, five or ten years ago, you would have been perfectly poised. You would have been ahead of the game. The problem with online marketing, however, is that the goalposts are always shifting.
Five years ago, you would start up a Facebook page. You would build up the readership of the page. You’d post pictures of your products or advertise your services on your page a couple of times a week, and you were set.
You would answer questions on your page as and when you had the time, but that was about the total level of engagement with your clients. Now, however, this kind of strategy is bound to land you a big fat zero.
Today’s clients want more. They are used to getting more. They know that you need them more than they need you, and now they want you to work for their respect. No one just “Likes” a Facebook page anymore without looking at the kind of content it posts.
Heck, depending on their age group, they may not even use Facebook anymore.
Social media is often critical to e-commerce success
Social media marketing has come to entail a lot more than just a one way communication from companies selling products or services to the clients. It has evolved into social commerce, where the focus is more on creating a win-win relationship that benefits both sides. You need to start engaging with your clients. You need to find out what it is that they want. What kind of things they like and what interests them. You need to tailor your content to what is important to them.
You want them to find your page interesting so that they will follow it and come back to it often. Amazon, for example, does this by offering various Amazon discounts and deals on their Facebook page on a daily basis in order to keep clients interested.
What you choose for your company will depend on the target market you want to appeal to. You could also try a similar “Daily Deals” approach, but it does pay to remember that social media content should, above all else, be useful to your client.
Tailored, Informative and Authoritative Content
Can you link to articles that might interest them? For example, if your company manufactures lunchboxes, why not create a post of recipes for school lunches? And a post for healthy work lunches, etc.? You can show the lunches packed appealingly in your lunchboxes as a kind of product placement, but you are not directly selling them. Instead of piling on the sales talk, which most people will tune out anyway, you are providing them with valuable information.
It increases the chances of them staying interested in your page, and increases the likelihood they will share the information with other people in their group as well. It’s an easy way to start building a larger following, without putting in too much effort.
So, what is your new social commerce strategy going to entail? What useful content can you provide? How can you get your clients engaged in a two-way conversation on your social media? These are all questions that you will need to ask yourself now.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out this infographic about the importance of social networks:
