So you have a business, but you don’t know how to find and post content that engages customers and encourages them to interact with your posts? You’re not alone. We can’t all work with the well-known, shall I say, famous companies of Apple, Coca Cola, Tesla, Amazon, Disney, Louis Vuitton… you get the idea. (Click here for an actual list of the 20 Most Valuable Brands In The World)
What if you sell fountains online? Or premium quality, custom shade sails? What do you have to say to your customers each and every day? Plenty.
Put yourself in your customers shoes.
First, your customers DO NOT want to hear about how great you are (you saying how great you are) all the time. In fact, if that sounds like something you’re doing you need to think about the 80/20 rule.If you’re unfamiliar, the 80-20 rule says, in effect, that every 8 out of 10 pieces of content that you push out should be “non-promotional” (it should come from someone else besides your brand, and/or about something else besides your brand), and the remaining 2 should be “promotional” (from your brand, and/or about your brand.)
Think about who you’re talking to and what they’re interested in. This could be so many things and I understand that you will need to break it down, but for example, if you are selling fountains, you have to think about who is buying them. Furthermore, why are they buying them? Are they gardeners who enjoy gardening content? Are they landscape architects who enjoy to view scenery and garden design. Are they building a new house for themselves and looking for a way to spice up the backyard? Or, could they be into feng-shui and looking for an indoor wall fountain for zen. By the way, I could go on and on. I won’t for the sake of you reading this, but I just want to reiterate the fact that you need to think hard about who your customers are in order to understand what type of content you should be looking for and posting on a day to day basis on your social media accounts.
The Snowball Effect
When someone likes your post on social media (or favorites, or RT’s, or comments, or shares, or what have you,) your post impressions increase. Think about it. If I like a post on Facebook about self warming fleece blankets for dogs, there is a large chance that my close friends will see that I liked that post on Facebook. It will say, Stephanie Sander Amy likes “such and such fleece post.” This also shows up in the tiny feed at the top right of your Facebook timeline screen. Why is this important? Well, because these are my close friends, people I trust and who trust me as well. They are more likely to take a look at the post because I liked it. Then, let’s say, they like it as well. All of the sudden, all of their friends can see that we liked the same post and so your reach has grown significantly due to each and every interaction. It may not seem like a lot, but if you think about how many friends each person has on Facebook – it’s a lot and can mean a large amount of impressions for you.
Search Engine Optimization
Keywords that you know your customers are searching for need to be factored in to your social media. If they aren’t already, please go back to each and every one of your accounts and take a look at the words you’re using to describe your company. If they are different from what people would search for to find your company, you should rethink the way you’r describing yourself. It’s important. Did you know that many people, if they are already on Facebook would rather search for a company there than open a new tab and go to Google? It’s true. Make sure that when people go to your social media sites they can identify what your business does in seconds – because that’s literally all the time they will spend on you before moving on to anther company they can comprehend clearly.
Another note I want to mention while talking about SEO is Google+. Ah yes, the dreaded Google+… It may seem like no one is using it and that may be correct, but there is one very significant benefit of having your business there: SEO. Google Maps show brick and mortar businesses in local search results and links them to their Google+ pages. You can see insights (analytics) on your Google+ page as well and your YouTube account, that’s also incorporated. Woof! That sounded like a mouthful, but it’s all there. As long as you use a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your posts in Google+ (making sure to use the right keywords and hashtags) you can use the same content that you’re posting on Facebook. It’s like pressing the Staples button, easy.
Today, customers do their research and if you are not active on social media and current with your business information, it will be difficult for them to consider you for business. They don’t call it the instant gratification generation for nothing.