Marketing Your Small Business Through Social Media

I often forget how valuable the things that I do on social media until I am reminded by the followers about the articles or they ask me to elaborate more on the status I updated on all my social networks. And this is how every marketer feels at some point in time in their career, sometimes you are afraid to explore a new strategy or  adventure into a new idea because you are afraid you will not be able to get the response you are expecting to get. As creatives, we should know better than to doubt our instincts and provide clients with fresh innovative ideas that will sustain their brand for months, even years to come. Recently, I have seen marketers who are very cautious on social media, some companies are using one person to communicate through their strategy or even social posts. Because they are used to strict outbound marketing rules, they want to apply them on social media. It was embarrassing for some company's CEO, who was asked about an article they posted on their blog which was posted by her, and she could not answer them, because the company has a policy that all communication about the company is only posted under her name. I wonder if they will review this ridiculous policy.

In this article, I am going to touch on some features of different social network platforms and their benefits which allows you to effectively market your small business to a wider audience. For the sake of the article, I will assume that you can use the rest of the features as they are linked to your success.

Facebook Timeline

We all know that Facebook is a powerful social media platform that can change the perception of your business to your benefit. And, I am pretty sure you know that Facebook has introduced the Timeline on Business Pages and there are tools you need to know about it and it will help your brand grow vertically an horizontally.

1. Set Your Cover Photo - this feature can offer your brand some flexibility, like a picture of your champion product or other things you can advertise. But there are some guidelines you need to follow. and they are as follows: 
• No contact information
• No Call to Action
• No Price or Purchase information
• No references to Facebook features or actions
2. Set your Profile Picture - Adjust your profile picture, the image that will get shown next to each of your updates on your wall and in users' news feeds, 
3. Organize Views & Apps - The new design features photos, likes, and apps at the top of oyur page, below your cover photo. Photos are automatically featured in the first spot, but page admins can rearrange the rest to feature the most important ones first. You can only show 12 apps. 
4. Star, Hide, Pin -By hovering over individual stories, you can make them wider, hide them from your Timeline with the pencil icon, highlight them as important with the star icon, or delete them entirely. 
5. Enable Messages - You can now have private conversations with your fans, which is very good, when people want to ask something very specific. 
6. Feature Milestones - The new design also allows admins to feature what are called "milestones" on their page. This allows page admins to highlight some of their business biggest accomplishments. 

All of these are very useful to your small business, firstly because it is free, but it will cost you in terms time. Through these new features you can show them how much you care and the quality you can offer. And with certain strategies, lure them into customers who will always be your own brand loyalists. 

Pintrest

Pintrest is a visual social network, so you will need to create a pinboard that highlights some of your best visual content. Remembering that your goal is to gain brand recognition, drive traffic to your website and be successful at converting the new visits into leads. Get your creative juices and let people see what you are doing and you might never know what people might fall in love with. A lot of brands are taking notice of the power of online visual content for marketing and the emotions images elicit in readers. Remember that you can explore and whatever images are good. Make it super easy for website visitors to share your visual content or images on Pinterest by adding a "Pin It" button to your site. Just like other social media sharing buttons, this will help to expose your brand to a new audience. 

Twitter

Twitter is one of the most exciting social networks in the industry at the moment, because it allows people to post things that are direct and gets to the point quick, which is what visitors want. But you can also use it to attract leads for your business and here are a couple of ideas. 

1. Tweet Offers - often as a small business owner, you want to advertise your offers forget about Twitter. But please read the guidelines to ensure you don't land up on the spam bot. 
2. Connect your blog to your Twitter Feed - There are tools that can help you achieve this, and you would be keeping your audience updated at the same time. 
3. Landing Pages - respond with landing pages that are related to the offers that you have posted on Twitter. 
4. Build Reach - What's the use of following any suggestions if you're not reaching anyone? This is where you need to revisit the basics of Twitter and remember to spend time building your following. The more people you sending information to, the higher your chance of generating leads. 

And the most important is to make sure you know how to measure you ROI and review if these are the results you are looking for. 

Although social media is relatively relaxed and easy going, you need to be careful on what you put out and know what parameters of the social network. When you have achieved this, your small business is well on its way to marketing success and most importantly, income generating initiatives is what keeps your business trading.