inCORPORATE Social Media into your Business Plan
Social media is great for personal use and branding oneself, but it’s even better for corporate use. When running a social media account for yourself, there’s only so much you can gain from it and only so much content that you can post. However, when you are a business owner running social media accounts for your business, you have more content and more that you can gain.
First lets start with what you can gain from having social media accounts for your business.
Benefits
Running social media accounts for your business is a great way to connect and interact with your consumers. As a business, it is important to know what your customers like and what they want to see from your business. Running social media accounts allows you to make that connection. There are also some ways to get immediate feedback from your consumers. One way is to make a poll, both Instagram and Twitter give you the option to host a poll.
Of course you can get feedback by reading comments on your posts or about your products, but hosting a poll is an easier way to get a collective response to what you are asking your consumers.
Another benefit of having social media accounts for your business is that you can advertise easily and freely. The perks of having social media is that its a free way to post content, whatever that content might be. Whether it’s a tweet with information on an upcoming event or a digital flyer, this is a great way to get that information across to your consumers and followers. Then you can receive feedback on that event and learn more about what your consumers look at in an advertisement. What makes them want to attend an event? What type of advertisements do they prefer? What types of advertisements do they look at and what works on them?
Another benefit is that you can reach a new audience. Maybe your business is only reaching one of your target audiences and you want to try reaching the other target audience. For example if your business is trying to reach women ages 18-65 but only reaching the 30-65 age range of women, you could use your social media accounts to try reaching the 18-30 age range of women by finding out what they like and what they look for in a product. You also can advertise to them through social media since that is where most of that age of people spend most of their time.
One big thing that businesses can gain from running social media accounts for their is that they can create meaningful relationships with their consumers and also increase their brand awareness. By having meaningful relationships with your consumers, you are more likely to be talked about by those consumers. That leads to getting more consumers and your brand being more well known. You will, of course, need to put some effort into brand awareness besides creating those relationships, but that will help and will also tell consumers that you care about your customers.
Content
On your personal social media accounts, there is only so much content you can post before your followers get annoyed. If you are posting a selfie everyday, your followers are going to get irritated. However, when you own a business, there is so much content you can post on your social media accounts.
Here are some examples of content that you can post on your social media accounts for your business:
Sales
New products
Advertisements for special event
New store locations
Repeat content
Maybe you want to have a special sale or you want to show new products or maybe you just want to keep your customers excited about the products you already have and drive more sales, you can do that and have plenty of content to post.
If you have social media accounts for your business, you might want to take a look at the content you are already posting and see how that is doing. How is that working for your business? Are you reaching the audiences you are trying to target?
A good way to check this is to revisit the chart from my last post and go back to the spreadsheet for social media audits. Audit your business social media accounts. Fill out the spreadsheet and decide if you need to change things about your account or not and what those changes are going to be.
After doing that, make the change.
Like the personal social media account changes, look to other accounts for inspiration. You want to look at similar businesses to yours. For example, if you own a clothing company, you would want to look at another clothing company for inspiration.
Here are some business social media accounts that I think do a great job at keeping their consumers in the loop of what is going on and does a great job at reaching its consumers.
Instagram: Lush Cosmetics
Lush is always posting new videos and pictures with a lot of different content. From the making of new products, to images of products they are bringing back, to information on what their workers are doing, Lush is always keeping their customers in the know through social media.
Twitter: Bali Body
Bali Body is not as widely known as Lush but is a great company that I am a huge fan of. Bali Body is a tanning oil business that is constantly posting content on both their Twitter and Instagram. However, their Twitter seems to be a little more beneficial as a consumer to follow. Some of their content is a little risqué, but that is the image they are going for to show how their product works. On their Twitter account, they are always posting pictures advertising their products, new products, how to use their products, and one other thing they do very well is they get their consumers involved by posting content that their followers send in.
Are you a business owner and interested in trying this plan? Let us know how it goes by leaving a comment and if it works for you, like and share this post. If you have another plan that might work better, leave it in the comments to share with others.
