Many people think that social media is a perfect place for engaging with and attracting new customers, while some think it’s a place where money and time is easily wasted - time and money that could be better spent on other sales and marketing activities that get better results. So - who is right, and what’s best for your business?

In this blog article, we go through the importance of taking the right approach to social media when promoting your brand. We will also provide top tips for ensuring your social media strategy is optimised for your business and your industry.

Let’s get started…

A worthwhile marketing channel?

Social media marketing has evolved a lot in the last 10 years and there are various benefits, but also many pitfalls. We often see businesses struggling to reach out to their potential customers or not knowing how to market their brand in the right way.

Despite this, we believe that social media marketing should be part of a marketing strategy for growing your business. It does, however, need to be done correctly.

If you use the wrong social media platforms or take the wrong approach, you can easily waste time with very little results but, get it right, and your brand can quickly shoot from the relatively unknown to the “trendy, must be part of” category where customers love to engage with you.

At aprompt, we were one of the early website designers to use various social media platforms, and we’ve been engaging with customers and prospects since the early days of Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, FB, YouTube, etc (before 2008 in case you were wondering!) - and we’ve learned a lot along the way.

We’ve built up relationships, gained new customers and built loyalty with existing ones - and, based on what we’ve learned, here are some tips to consider:

Go where your target audience is

Before putting in any effort on social media, ask yourself who your target audience is, and where they hang out. There’s no point in posting and interacting on a social platform if your customers don’t use it.

If you provide photography, wedding services or provide products based on beautiful design then Instagram might be your key platform to use. If you resell vintage clothing then TikTok, Discord, Spotify, Facebook and Instagram might be the place you need to be. 

If, however, you provide B2B services (including consultants, accountants and website designers) then LinkedIn is where you are more likely to find your target audience.

Depending on your industry and your target audience, you might decide to use up to 3 or 4 social media platforms. This can also help to increase your exposure and the chances of being found by customers.

Chosen your profiles? Great.

Let’s move on to some tips for how to use the different social platforms to get results.

Set up your social media profiles correctly

They say never judge a book by its cover, but what about a social media profile? Whether we like it or not, first impressions count and a social profile with no photo and sketchy details are likely to scare off people who might want to buy from you.

Get your profiles set up properly so that they look great, and then start using the platforms to build your brand.

Take action, daily

Each platform is different and the actions you take will vary accordingly. If TikTok is your chosen route then you’ll need to get good at creating videos and liking and commenting on video posts.

If you’re using LinkedIn, however, you’ll need to get good at finding the right connections based on their profiles and using a different style and tone of language.

We aren’t going to go through the best practices for each platform here (call us if you need to), but consider the following:

  • Make sure your activities add value and are enjoyable to your audience
  • Question if what you are doing is either increasing your brand online or moving you toward generating sales (or both)

If you would like to understand what activities to consider as part of your social media marketing, get in touch with us. We would be happy to discuss with you how to be more effective. We'll probably start with your website though!

You should also consider the following:

Use the right hashtags: Using hashtags on most platforms increases your chances of being found. Decide what hashtags are relevant and likely to get you found and use them. But remember not to use so many hashtags that your message gets lost!

Engage and use humour: Constant promotional posts can alienate loyal customers. Instead try creating fun social media posts, including some light humour. This has proven to increase engagement on social media.

Review progress: Before you spend 2 years on social media, only to find out it hasn’t worked, make sure you review your progress monthly or quarterly. By doing this, you can work out what has worked, and what hasn’t. And you can repeat anything that has got you results!

It’s a much better way compared to wasting 2 years of your time doing something that doesn’t work!

We hope you have found this blog post useful. At aprompt, we work with customers to design and build stunning easy to use websites for small and medium businesses, and to help them get found online.

If you would like to talk to our website designers about growing your business, get in touch today.

We'd love to hear about your business!