Do you use social media for business or have you thought of using it? You are in the right place. One of the goals of every business including yours as a Nigerian is to gain the trust of its customers and to create an exposure for its products and services.
In achieving that, having a marketing strategy that includes proven practices used in social media for business without eating up too much of your budget is very important.
Nowadays, the average person spends about 3 or more hours per day on a range of different social media sites. A marketer like me is thinking about how I can capture the attention of those important to me.
Like you, I want to maximize my social media presence and I am certain you want to too, else you wouldn’t be reading this.
With so many social networks to consider, what’s the best way to maximize your company’s social media marketing campaigns and to engage as many people as possible? so that you can avoid these mistakes.
You might say it is difficult to maximize the use of social media for your business in Nigeria, but as long as you know the benefits social media brings to your business and you will follow these practices for your every social media effort,
Using Social Media for Business will Amaze you
1. Set Measurable Social Media Goals.
It is necessary that you define how you want social media to help your business.
You’ll need to create objectives that will help achieve these goals in such a way that growth is measurable, and with that, you can develop a winning social media strategy that will improve your business.
Write down your goal visions, goal, key influencers, brand’s personality, the metrics you will use to measure the success of your strategy.
Furthermore, your strategy should cover more than just having more likes, shares, and retweets!
Focus on making sure that each of your social media posts supports a strategic goal such as:
- Build Brand Awareness: Get the public to know your name, with a good view of your business.
- Gain New Customers: Get more people to visit your social media business page or website.
- Strengthen Customer Service: Engage with new and returning customers by answering questions.
- Increase Engagement: Interact with your fans/followers so they can mention your brand and refer others to do business with you.
2. Speak to a specific Audience.
In creating contents and communicating with your customers, it is important that you have a clear definition of who your audience is.
Have a breakdown of their demographics, including everything from their age range to hobbies, and marital status.
In Knowing as much as you can about who your buyers are, you can speak directly to them in a tone that befits them.
This is essential for every successful social media campaign. It will help your readers to connect effortlessly, you’d understand their pain and deliver solutions that they are more than willing to pay for.
One thing you should know is that your audience can change and expand. It is important that you focus your every social media effort around them, and adapt as they change.
3. Follow the one-in-seven rule.
This rule states that only one of your every seven posts should promote your business. The remaining six should focus on sharing valuable contents.
One thing you should never forget is, although you are on social media for business, your customers are there to socialize…
A common mistake made by many businesses is to limit their content to promotional updates. This works in the traditional marketing world, but things have changed; now you are to build your marketing efforts on trust, engagements, and community.
Always talking about you and what you offer will after a while bore your followers. It is important to spice up your contents.
Business if for the customers and not for you
There is, of course, a time and place for marketing and promotional messages, but don’t limit yourself to that. Broaden your scope a bit, This will make your content more appealing.
4. Content Quality Over Quantity.
More is not always better!
If you didn’t know that before now, now you do.
Always generate quality social media content that is valuable to your customers. A good use of social media for business should have a content mix of the following:
- Promotional
- Thought leadership
- Engagement with followers
Create a calendar to help you organize and schedule your social media for business strategy over a long period of time, say one month or even longer.
This will help you to be consistent in your postings, make it easier as you would not be burdened with the task of brainstorming for a post idea few hours to when the post is to go live
. This will make you more organized.
Always revisit the calendar at the end of that time period, and analyze it to see which content types gained the most engagement, exposure, and shares.
5. Always Provide value.
Let me tell you the secret to the growth of every business…
It is in this word called VALUE
I cannot overemphasize how important value provision is to your business. Your customers will only come back on the level of how much value you have provided for them.
Let us carry out a little exercise.
Ask yourself the following questions in regards to the last clients or customer you had dealings with.
To what extent did I solve their problems?
How much satisfaction did they receive by coming in contact with me and my product?
Will they come back for more?
The truth is when you place giving customers value for their time and money, you place your business at a point of definite success.
Let your products and services deliver exactly what they promised to deliver, else you lose credibility and the power of recommendation.
I am a 100% you would recommend to a friend the store you got the best deal for your last cloth shopping, and you will also discourage him from the other store that left you disappointed.
It’s all about Value.
Giving value will set you apart, it will make your customers and buyers trust you the more. and that is what we all want. If a customer trusts you, they’ll always buy more and more from you.
So, always remember to deliver great value. Try more than is expected.
6. Monitor Social Media Analytics
Analyze your social media analytics pages on a regular basis, this will give an insight on the extent to which you have gone in attaining your goals.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites give insights on the growth, interaction, and engagements on its pages, make full use of them.
By using the Facebook Audience insight app, you get to find out about your audience, what other kinds of pages they like, the kind of ads that will engage them more.
Always carry out analysis of your social presence. See what and what is not working, this will help you to find ways to restrategize.
You know you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different result right?
Same way, Analytics shows you that your strategy is working, and with that, you can intensify your efforts in that direction.
A couple of other platforms such HootSuite or Buffer, also help with this. they are also tools for scheduling contents.
Check out this post on How To Run a Successful Facebook Ad Campaign In Nigeria.
Yea.. That is the gospel truth here in this article. As an Entertainment blogger, I have seen the good impact of social media in promoting my contents and even wish to start using it to promote my newly-to-launch products.
Also, promoting blog contents on social media platforms will also boost a blog rank based on social signal.
This is my first time being here, I will bookmark your blog and visit again. Continue the good work.
Taofeek, Thank you for stopping by…
Indeed Social Media has the capacity to showcase any brand if properly managed.
Lemme come and be going
I have learnt something more
Omogood, Thanks for stopping by, and I am glad I could add to your knowledge.
It is always a pleasure.
Yes!
The new things I learnt shall be applied by me.
Keep up the good work
👌😂