Social media sites are the hottest way to get your company name and products or services in front of potential customers. People log on to these sites daily, often while they’re doing other things like watching TV, reading e-books or playing video games.
If you’re a small business owner, you probably have only one or two social media sites that you use most typically for your marketing efforts. For example, on Facebook, it’s more popular among young people to use the site for music and shopping than for business purposes. LinkedIn has more professional uses and a higher-end clientele. For example, many lawyers use LinkedIn to find job leads and to build their brands as experts in their fields. The same holds true for Twitter: It’s more popular among younger people, who use it for news and entertainment purposes than for business purposes.
There are many ways to generate social media traffic. The trick is to find something that works best for your business. Here are five things you can do right now to get a head start on reaching your audience and growing your customer base.
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Use hashtags
When you post on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, use relevant hashtags in your title and description tags. Include relevant keywords in the text of the post, too. That will help you reach more people searching for the same topics and draw traffic from their friends.
You’re probably already doing this. If you’re not, then you may have missed out on a few opportunities to grow your social media following. But don’t stop now — use hashtags the right way, and they can have a major impact on your social media efforts.
Hashtag usage is a bit of an art, but here are some tips:
- Pick relevant words to use in your title or description tags. One word will do – place only one hashtag in a post or within the body of your message. The more keywords you can include, the better your chances of getting found.
- Include relevant keywords within the text of your message. If you’re promoting an event, include keywords related to that event in your post’s title and description, along with relevant hashtags for that specific event. This is also good practice for sharing content from other people on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
These can help readers find your content and make it easier to find. For example, if someone is looking for gardening tips, they might click on a post that says “#tips #usefultips #SEOtips” etc.
Add Frequent, Useful Updates
This is the single best way to keep people coming back to your site. Keep your followers in the loop with news, tips and how-to guides that help solve their problems. People will be much more likely to return if they know you’ve got something valuable for them.
By adding frequent, useful updates on your website, you’re giving people an incentive to come back and check out what you have to offer. Blogs are the best way to do this because they provide more space than other types of online content.
Here are some things that can be added to a blog:
- Tips and tricks: If you’ve got tips and tricks in your blog, people will be pretty happy if they find out about them.
- How-to guides: People want to know how to do things, and a how-to guide is a perfect opportunity to explain how you did something or why it works.
- News stories: The best news stories are those that make people feel like they’re in the know about something — for instance, an industry trend or a company’s vision for the future. Use news stories as a way of telling people about the things you believe are important for them to know.
This also applies to social media accounts where you interact with customers. You can post links to your blog posts and news there, and people will see it as an opportunity to learn more about your products and services.
Promote other people’s posts
It’s a good idea to promote other people’s posts on social media, especially if you’re a small business owner. Facebook and Twitter offer ways to promote links from within the social media site itself, and you can add a link that takes people directly to their page. If the post is from someone who has a strong following, it can earn you some serious social media traffic in return.
By promoting other people’s posts, you’re essentially converting some of their fans into your own. This is a good way to boost your engagement and get more people to see your content.
Social media sites offer a number of ways to promote someone else’s content, including:
- 1. Clicking the “promote” button in the post’s social section.
- 2. Leaving a comment on the post thanking the author for sharing their content with your audience.
- 3. Adding a link to the author’s page in the social section of your blog or website.
- 4. Adding a link that takes followers directly to their page in a few clicks.
You can also have a website link that takes people directly to the post in a few clicks. This provides an additional benefit: You can set up your page to track which of your followers are interested in certain posts, and use it to send them information about new products or other news they might be interested in.
Make sure that your social media pages are mobile-friendly
Mobile-friendly pages are especially important for social media. The vast majority of people access their social media accounts from their phone, so if your page doesn’t work well on a mobile device, you’re going to miss out on the majority of your followers.
It’s important to realize that not all websites are created equal when it comes to accessibility. Many companies optimize pages for users’ PCs, which means the text and images are displayed in a way that looks great on a desktop. But if you have a mobile device, you won’t be able to see all the information displayed on the website because of poor design.
There are a lot of different ways you can optimize your social media pages to make them more friendly for mobile devices, including:
- Ensuring your images are large enough to show up clearly on smaller screens
- Making sure your text is also readable at smaller sizes
- Testing every page on both desktop and mobile devices to see how it looks and reacts.
It’s important to remember that mobile browsers don’t work exactly like desktop browsers do, so you need to be aware of some of their limitations and how they’ll impact your site.
Use video on social media sites when possible
You can also post videos directly to social media accounts. Be sure to choose the right video format — it should be optimized for the specific platform you’re posting it to — and add keywords and tags that will help search engines find it.
When you’re ready to start posting videos, you might want to consider using a professional videographer who can do all the behind-the-scenes work for you — post-production editing, color correction and so on. This can be very expensive but will ensure your video looks great.
When it comes to online marketing, video is king. According to a report from HubSpot, the average person spends more than 50 minutes a day watching TV, and that number rises to more than three hours on smartphones. In addition, Pew Research found that people spend around four hours a month watching videos on their mobile devices and nearly five hours a month on their TVs.
“People are spending more time with videos every day,” said Matt Gerardi, director of digital marketing for HubSpot. “This means marketers need to be prepared to tell stories in video.”
Video content is commonly posted on social media sites including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. However, what many people fail to realize is that the way you post your content matters. According to HubSpot, the best practice for creating effective videos is to record and upload your video from the same device you shot it with. This will ensure that each frame and audio clip isn’t stitched together using different software.
Conclusion
Social media sites have revolutionized the way companies can engage with their customers. If you haven’t figured out your social media strategy, you could be missing half the audience who are on these sites every day. These days, it’s a necessity to be actively involved in social media marketing if you want to gain new customers.
