5 Social Media Tips to Grow Your New Business How to better know your audience and convert more sales.
By Erica Dushey Sarway Edited by Bill Schulz
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When it comes to building a brand, social media remains one of the best tools in aiding a business in reaching its target audience. The medium builds brands, provides customers with information about their debut, and gives them a chance to provide feedback.
The term "viral" is used to describe produced content that is widely shared across many platforms. It all brings a lot of good (and/or bad) attention to a brand and can help reach new audiences if done the right way.
Here are a couple of key tips for burgeoning businesses looking to build their presence across all online options.
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1. Know your platforms
There are many different social media categories that all have their own uses with different audiences. Make sure you understand each platform, what type of content goes on it and what crows you should corral. The most popular include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and Snapchat. Your business may be suitable to have a presence on all or only some of these options.
2. Keep posts brand-focused
Write about your business and things that relate to it. Social media is a very good way to make you visible to your audiences. However, if you are commenting on other accounts or posting controversial missives? Audiences see that and it can have a negative impact on your image. Make the page about your product, period.
3. Create relationships
Being social simply means responding to comments, liking posts from other accounts, following different people, etc. It shows that your page is more than just an advertisement for your business but that you care about your followers.
Engagement can also mean asking questions and commenting on posts and pushing users to interact with you. Ask for feedback from users, which is useful insight in understanding your customer better. Being active can also help you find other businesses, like yours, and create a community. The more engagement your page shows, the more other people will interact.
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4. Organic growth is always important
Although users may be impressed by a page that has over 100,000 followers, if the posts are only getting 1,000 likes it's clear that the followers were bought and are fake. That is just one-way users can easily tell when a page purchased followers to make themselves look more popular than they really are.
Every page has to start somewhere and although you may not gain thousands of disciples overnight, it is better to slowly gain a genuine audience than having people who have no interest in ever becoming a customer. Building a real herd of loyalists is hard, and sometimes disappointing when the numbers are not climbing insanely fast, but the more genuine your presence is online, the more attractive it is for real users to engage. In this medium, slow and steady still wins the race.
5. Create original content
Every day, companies put out new content, trying to outdo their competitors and bring more attraction to their business. This can be anything from a picture to a short video to a podcast. There are countless ways to produce appealing views that are relevant to your business. Making sure your page is filled with original images and videos can help make you more recognizable.
It's telling that a recent survey, conducted by Propel Software, of 2,000 American adults found that 51% claimed a great social media experience, (such as fast replies or funny posts) would convince them to give the brand a try.
Platforms are constantly growing and evolving, so as a new business, you have to jump in and get right into building up your pages.
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