How to use social networks to expand your market Fiche ARTCADEMY

How to use social networks to expand your market

ICT_1

Title: How to use social networks to expand your market

Keywords: social networks, craft, market expansion, Facebook, Twitter, Business expansion

Author: IWS

Languages: English

Contents

Using social media for marketing can enable small business looking to widen their reach to more customers. Your customers are interacting with brands through social media, therefore, having a strong social media marketing plan and presence on the web is the key to tap into their interest. If implemented correctly, marketing with social media can bring remarkable success to your business.
Once you have defined the starting points you can proceed and implement the following:
• Planning – Building a social media marketing plan is essential. Consider keyword research and brainstorm content ideas that will interest your target audience.
• Start with a clear strategy: Why do you want to increase your contacts? Is it to find new customers or drive traffic to your site? Different channels require different approaches. For example, increasing your contacts on Facebook will have different benefits then when your recommendations on LinkedIn are growing. You need to ask yourself these questions; What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing? Who is your target audience? Which social media website is your target audience using? How would they use social media? What message do you want to send to your audience with the online marketing campaign?
• Get blogging - Use a blog platform such as Wordpress to update clients and suppliers with news from your business. Comment on other people’s blogs or start a discussion thread in an online networking forum.
• Follow the one- in- seven rule: This is a rule that you can use with promotional posts on your social networks. The rule is, that one in the seven posts can be a promotion that advertising your company. The remaining six should be focused on sharing valuable content, including posts from the community.
• Provide value: While including posts that are fun, it is important that you make sure that your posts reflect your personality. It is also important that your campaigns have a content that fit your target audience.
• Share news about your company: Social network marketing keeps your customers informed about what is going on in your office, for example , share the news about a launch of new products.
• Connect with your customers - You may already have a Facebook or Twitter profile for your personal use; create a social networking profile for your business to connect directly with your customers.
• Sign up for accounts at social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook: Choose social networking communities that best reflect your target group demographics. For example, LinkedIn is focused on building business connections, while Facebook is a fun way for people of all ages and backgrounds to share news about their lives, preferences of products and activities.
• Sign up existing customers: Take advantage of your clients and their potential followings. When people visit your website or online store, ask them to join your mailing list and social network, request their social media accounts and email addresses to send them an exclusive promotional incentives as a thank you, along with the request to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ your company. Include action buttons (for example, “Like this page” and “learn more”) in your posts to gain more interest, clicks and views to your page. Provide a link to a sign up page on your website to make it easier for them.
• Encourage feedback - Encouraging and acting on feedback allows you to tailor your product or service to your customers’ needs. Use www.twtpoll.com to create a poll for your Twitter followers, or ask friends, followers and customers to offer feedback on your product or service.
• Links - While using social media for marketing relies primarily on your business sharing its own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and devotees, it’s also great to link to outside articles as well. If other sources provide great, valuable information you think your target audience will enjoy, don’t be shy about linking to them. Linking to outside sources improves trust and reliability, and you may even get some links in return.
• Note what your customers want - If similar queries come up regularly, look at how they can be avoided by changing your processes. If this is not possible, add an FAQ section to your website to answer regular queries.
• Watch what customers are saying about your products, campaigns and other activity: By measuring the activities of your customers on your post, you can get a clear overview about what they think of the campaign or product.
• Consistent Brand Image - Using social media for marketing enables your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’ core identity should stay consistent.
• Measure Success with Analytics -You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your triumphant social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned. Attach tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor them.
More in detail:
Facebook -> With online campaigns you can increase your brand awareness with a bigger target group.
• Strengthen your Facebook network. If you find that you aren't getting the response you are from your company's Facebook page, create some groups to spark more connections and conversations around your product and brand. Your customers can also choose to get updates from you this way.
• Build a community on Facebook. This is where your existing fans and customers meet, so you should engage differently. However, it is a good place to start word-of-mouth campaigns to attract more people, maybe their friends, to become fans. Your pages’ main message should be that this is a place for social contacts, not just your brand or business.
Twitter -> Updates about what the company is doing and other relevant information. You reach another target group then with Facebook.
• Make your tweets stand out. If you don't want your posts to get lost in the Twitter stream, make sure to include an image, related link or even an emoji to separate your missives from the torrent of other tweets.
• Express yourself with longer posts. If you feel limited by Twitter's 140 character count, feel free to expand on a point with posts on platforms like Tumblr, Google+ and LinkedIn.
• Let them tweet. Many of your existing offline contacts will probably already be on Twitter, so start by sending them an email asking them to follow you and follow them back. But most importantly, ensure your tweets are relevant, interesting and friendly. Don’t concentrate on sales messages or product pushes, but vary tweets with broader topics and updates from your sector.
LinkedIn ->You can expand and increase your relationship with your network with key contacts.
• Boost connections on LinkedIn. Increase the contacts in your network by browsing your contacts’ connections. LinkedIn will calculate your ‘degrees of separation’ and you can use common connections as a starting point for making new contacts. New contacts expose you to an even wider range of people through their friends and business partners.
Pinterest -> You can share pictures that are connected to your website.
• Create a Pinterest board. Make sure the board has eye-catching visuals and run a contest through it that will inspire and reward customers for their participation. Be sure to encourage them to re-pin and create their own boards that reflect the initial contest for additional social amplification of your campaign.

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Results

At the end of the course you will have enough knowledge on how to start and use social networks to expand your market, improve marketing skills, increasing social network awareness.

Indicators

Reach: It is important to know how many fans, followers, likes and connections you have, this is a good indication of your companies reach on social media. When you start noticing that more people start to unfollow you then follow you, you need to change your strategy. You also need to make sure that your content is in line with your target audience.

Demographics and Location: By using Facebook Page Insights and Twitter Ads Analytics you can analyse all aspects of your profile, who is visiting your page, percent of male and female users, how many times somebody has liked a post and is it your target group.

Engagement: Number of active followers: Not everyone that is following you is active on social media, this happens more often than you think. An active follower is considered to be someone who has logged in and interacted within the past 30 days.

Comments: Social media can be used as an unofficial platform for companies to interact with their customers. Comments are a way to keep the conversation going, it is important that you as a company react on the comment of the client. If you do not respond to a comment or question, there is a possibility that people will start unfollow of unlike you. Mentions: Is anyone mentioning you in their tweets? It is a great way for your followers to communicate with you as a company and to share your content. If you want to know an overall number of mentions from the last couple of months you can use Twitter Analytics to analyse.

Retweets: Nobody is retweeting your posts on Twitter? You might want to consider the content and tone of your tweets, there is a possibility that your tweet do not interest your target audience.

Focus on the networks where your target buyers spend time: It takes a lot of time and resources to keep up multiple social media accounts, so you want to make sure you are prioritizinng the social networks that matter. That means taking the time to research your buyers so that you can find out where they hang out on social media.

Learning Outputs

Online learning