I’m wondering how often are you actually on social media? Think about how many times a day you’re going on, whether it’s to check your profiles or for business. Do you find yourself constantly being on it for business purposes or personal purposes? We’re going to talk about leveraging social media to grow your brand!
I want to talk to you today about how you can use social media to increase your business. We’re going to talk about social media and business, but you can also use it on a personal level and for business as well.
I want to talk to you about the seven different ways that you can use it to help do market research, to help get you more reach, more distribution of your posts, content marketing, things like that.
Leveraging Social Media to Grow Your Brand
When you’re thinking about social media for your business, you want to consider it as a branding tool. And it can be many other tools for you as well, but it is a tool. It’s how you use it. So some people use it to promote themselves.
I’m going to tell you right now that’s only going to get you so far. Because that’s not how social media works. Social media is a place where people want to be social and want to be entertained; they want to be distracted. They do want to learn some things. But it’s not a place for you to constantly put a billboard out there like you see on the highway or a car ad on television.
You also want to use it, especially as an entrepreneur, as a way to find more loyal customers, more loyal clients, people that will trust you, people that will come to you for knowledge, okay. So that’s why social media is such an essential tool for us as entrepreneurs.
Use social media for connections and engagement
I don’t mean by friending as many people as you possibly can. I mean that having human connections with other people and on a business page goes a long way. If you have a business page, most likely you’ll think, “Ugh, I spent so much time creating this content, and coming up with this post, and posting it, and nobody liked it, nobody commented on it, nobody shared it.”
Here’s the thing: you need to play with an algorithm, and it can work to your advantage if you play with it well. Some ways of playing with it are by connecting with other people by your actions.
What you’re doing on Facebook. What you’re doing on Instagram, are you active, are you commenting, not just liking other people’s posts, but are you commenting? Whether it’s in your personal or on your business page, you must connect! You need to get into that algorithm because there’s only so much inventory and space on Facebook’s newsfeed. The more you connect, the more you’re going to get engagement in your business page organically.
Although you have a business page to do business on, you want to make it as humanly possible and relatable, and it has to do with your language. When you start building more connections, Facebook recognizes that, and it will help boost the engagement and distribution of your posts.
That’s where engagement comes into play. Engage with those people by replying to them and then taking it a step further. Send them a message from your Facebook page when they comment on your posts. That’s a great way to have a personal one-on-one conversation with that person, and they are most likely a lead for you.
Use social media for customer service
It’s a great way to respond to customers, whether they’re good comments or bad comments. In fact, responding to negative ones will make you look more like a human and like you care. When you catch a negative review or response to a product or service of yours on social media, even though it’s public and it might be embarrassing at first, you can quickly fix it, find a solution, and make it better.
Doing customer service on social media is a great way to improve it and get feedback from any complaints and bad reviews.
Use ads and paid traffic
Ads can get frustrating. However, when you get it right, they can help you with your organic reach, as well as conversions. We do various strategies here at Hype Media when it comes to Facebook ads, depending on what the goal is. There is a strategy that runs a dollar a day to get you an audience and to build an audience for you.
Another thing that I always stress out to my clients do not hit that boost button right away. What you need to do is open your business manager account and run your ads through there. You have so many more options, and you have a lot more control over your Facebook page.
Branding
It’s a great place to use branding because you have the opportunity to create your voice and do a lot of storytelling. Also, aesthetically, you can show what colors are part of your brand. If you have not started doing Facebook live videos yet on your business page, I would love to challenge you and do it once a week!
Try to keep it on the same day of the week and at the same time every week, that way people will get used to it. It will help you with your reach, you can build custom audiences from those who watch, and then you can advertise to them.
Research and data collection
Part of your brand is knowing your target audience and your avatar, which I like to call human beings. So who is your perfect ideal client? You can use social media to figure this out by using it for research, and there are different ways to do that. You can follow other competitive Facebook pages, and you can go into groups and see what people are asking about, go to the search bar of that group, and find out some hot topics.
Put in keywords that have to do with your business, and you’ll see what kind of conversations are happening right now that have to do with keywords that pertain to your business. One of my favorite ways many people don’t know about this tool is audience insight, even if you have a business manager! When you are looking to build content or create an audience to advertise with, maybe it’s a cold audience you’re trying to reach. You go into audience insights inside the business manager and select a particular age group.
You can choose a certain country and then a specific interest. Then you can pinpoint exactly what people in these different demographics, what kind of pages they are into. It will populate the top ten Facebook pages that people like based on a particular interest. Then what you do is go into those pages, and you’ll see what kind of posts have high engagement on them, and that’s going to give you a great idea of what type of content that you should be putting together that is going to relate to that perfect ideal client you are looking to reach.
So using social media for research is a fantastic tool!
Tracking of trends like hashtags
Although Facebook is not a place we typically see a lot of hashtags, I will tell you that it is changing! I know I even told my clients not to use hashtags on your Facebook posts, but I attended a mastermind, and it looks like that might be changing. It’s not hurting our post’s reach as much as we think it used to. Hashtags might be more a new thing on Facebook, and it’s a thing within Instagram and even LinkedIn.
What you do is go into Instagram, for example, and you type in a certain hashtag, you’ll see what the top posts are for that hashtag, and look at the content that’s being posted that relates to that hashtag.
Something that I suggest is don’t use the most popular hashtags on a post because you just won’t get found. So mix it up, use popular hashtags, and then go down from there. Maybe use hashtags that are between five hundred thousand to a hundred thousand, or even a thousand!
It is a fantastic place for networking
Especially now that we are not networking outside of our office or home, at least not yet for most of us, Facebook groups are a great place to network. Now, you want to be careful because there can be some trolls inside of Facebook groups.
Use Facebook groups to show up as a human being who can add value to the group, give some tips, stay on top of other comments, and see something pops up. It has to do with your industry. Throw in a comment, that way, you start to become more visible inside Facebook groups, and then you can build connections from there once people start replying to you.
Those are the seven ways to use Facebook or Social Media in general to your advantage to increase your profits for your business but also to increase your visibility and to make more human connections. Because in the end, it’s all about your brand and how you are connecting with others.
You need to be realistic about your results. By using those seven different ways to use social media, and you’re doing them consistently, strategically, and effectively, you will get the results you need.
