The web has levelled the playing field for marketing and communication. Add social media to the mix, and you are all set to tell your brand story, establish your industry expertise, and drive sales cost-effectively.

 

What Social Media Can Do for Your Business?

As traditional marketing strategies prove to be less effective, businesses across Australia are looking to social media platforms to connect with and engage consumers positively.

It’s important to recognise how social media has effectively changed the way we communicate, connect, and collaborate. Social media can enable you to effectively:

• Build and nurture your professional and personal networks.
• Enhance the visibility of your brand.
• Engage with people, answering their questions.
• Build and grow relationships with influencers and customers.
• Publish and share original content that establishes your expertise.
• Share curated content that adds value to your customers.
• Communicate with your growing community of followers, supporters, and advocates proactively and in real time.
• Ultimately generates new leads and boosts sales.

 

The Social Connect

Social media is made of two sides:

First is social media participation. This involves having an active presence on social platforms and delivering value to your online community. Here are some things you can do:

• Share user-generated content (other people’s content) on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
• Answer questions people have if you can help. These questions may or may not be related to your business.
• Leave genuine, relevant, and interesting comments on selected blogs and podcasts.
• Join the conversation on a specific topic. This could be on a LinkedIn Group or Twitter about a specific issue/topic that’s taking social media by storm.
• Promote other causes and businesses. For instance, your local council might be organising a street festival that could prove useful for your business when promoted.

Second is the creation and distribution of content that enlightens, empowers, informs, educates, or entertains; content that attracts the right audience to your brand, prospective customers as well and influencers.

For effective results, it’s important to create, publish, and promote content with your target audience in mind.

 

Creating Content with Your Audience in Mind

Many businesses make the mistake of creating promotional content that does not deliver anything of value to the audience.

When it comes to your social media presence, it’s important to recognise that a major part of the content you publish should be utility. It must be relevant and useful whilst adding value to your audience.

It could be a piece that provides a solution to a pain point of your target audience. Perhaps it could be a piece that establishes ‘thought leadership’, demonstrating your expertise and knowledge.

Once the content has been created, it’s all about publishing it to one of the several platforms that are suited to your requirements (your business blog is an excellent platform to start with) and sharing the links with your social media platforms.

 

Conclusion

In today’s digitally connected work, a robust social media presence is critical to the success of your business. A solid presence can not only complement your content distribution efforts, but even the search engines rely on social signals to identify the usefulness of content when ranking a page. All in all, a social media presence is good for business, sales, and profitability.