With nearly 70 percent of Americans now on social media, it has become a go-to digital marketing tool for businesses. But, as the game has become more popular, the level of difficulty has also increased. Your company can’t simply post any old thing and expect to generate quality leads. By learning how to promote your business effectively on social media, you can boost your brand’s awareness, conversion rate or more.
5 Tips for How to Promote your Business on Social Media
1) Customize Posts for Each Platform
Not all social media platforms are created equal. From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, they all have subtle differences. For example, a picture and humorous caption could be a good play on Facebook, but on LinkedIn it might cause your followers to hide your future posts. Social media marketing performance is generally stronger when each piece of content is tailored to the network where it is posted.
2) Include Visual Content
Social media and visuals go together like ham and eggs. Businesses today often use pictures and video content to strengthen their strategy. The result is an increase in key social performance indicators, including comments, shares or likes.
- Twitter posts with images increase retweets by 150 percent.
- LinkedIn posts that included images received 98 percent more comments.
- On Facebook, 100 million hours of video content are watched every day.
3) Write Catchy Headlines
Quickly catching the attention of your target audience is more important than ever today, because of the high-volume of daily posts. One of the best engagement strategies is to write concise, engaging headlines that encourage more link clicks.
4) Encourage Interaction
At its best, social media is a conversation between friends. Instead of only publishing links and ads, your business page can join in the fun by posting questions, memes, polls or even caption contests.
5) Pay to Play
With social media traffic steadily increasing, an advertising budget has become a crucial part of how to promote your business. For as little as five dollars a day, your message can reach a much wider audience.
How Not to Promote your Business on Social Media
1) Over-promote
On social media, constantly promoting products or services is taboo. Nobody wants to be bombarded with solicitations while they try to enjoy themselves on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. One popular suggestion is to follow the 80/20 rule, which calls for restricting promotional content to 20 percent of all postings.
2) Ignore Targeting Opportunities
Even more so than traditional advertising, social media gives you the opportunity to target your message to a specific audience. For example, Facebook targeting can help make sure your ads reach the right demographics, like gender, age and location.
3) Forget to Integrate other Marketing Tactics
There’s no doubt social media marketing works. But, it works even better when coupled with other inbound marketing services, like graphic design or email marketing. For example, if your company has a blog, you could post links to your own content rather than direct traffic to someone else’s website.
Nationally, there are now 4 million businesses running ads on Facebook. The reality is that if you don’t learn how to promote your business on social media today you will fall behind the competition tomorrow.
