As mentioned in our last post, any new business is reliant on getting the word out there to bring in future customers. Think of your website and social media channels as working together to bring you potential customers and informing them about your business.
Once you have written the content for your site, optimized the SEO on your pages and begun writing your blog to be disseminated via email and some social media channels, you are doing a great job at getting the word out about your business.
The goal of using social media is to bring potential customers back to your website. It is important to set up your social media channels as part of your marketing reach -You do not have to be active on all social media- find those that work for your brand. However, you should at least set up an account for each of the platforms in the name of your business and then have your contact info within it at the very least.
A visual brand- such as fashion, food, beauty, floristry etc are more appropriate for the photography based Instagram.
If you are looking to work with other businesses (known as Business to Business, B2B) then LinkedIn may be a more appropriate channel.
Facebook is the most widely used channel with over a billion users every day. It is a good starting point to promote your business to your friends, followed by a targeted ad campaign through your business page. In order to have a business page you should set up a personal account first, then link the business page to you, the owner. Don't have a member of staff set up the business account because if they leave your firm it is very difficult to prove to Facebook that you are the owner. Update your business page at least monthly and encourage your customers to like your page so that they can follow your updates and news.
Snapchat has a younger demographic of users and industries such as fashion, music, film and journalism are using their stories to promote their brands via their snapchat stories. Learn more about Snapchat
Twitter is a great way to create brand awareness. You can follow industry leaders or "influencers" and retweet relevant articles. When you retweet they are likely to follow you and it is relatively easy to build up a following for your original content.
We will go into more detail about each platform and how to use it in future blog posts.