Did you know that 23% of UK B2B businesses rate poor organisational understanding of social media as one of the top challenges they face this year? As the world is becoming more technologically savvy and the ‘social media generation’ are finding themselves in key roles within businesses, this is shocking to me. Social media is a very powerful tool within the initial attraction stage of the buyer’s journey, and it’s only growing stronger.
With a small amount of time and effort, you can transform your business’ social media footprint from poor or non-existent to effective and compelling.
1. Create interesting, helpful content that appeals to your target personas
Work to be perceived as a thought leader in your industry. If you are seen to be knowledgeable in the subjects that surround your product or service, potential customers will trust you. Your social media content should be a mixture of the following:
- Blogs written by your employees – Remember, it’s a blog, not a brag. You shouldn’t be writing content that promotes your product or service, just provide helpful information on topics your reader will care about. Social content is for developing trust, not direct sales.
- Guest blogs – Guest blogs are a great way of giving your readers and followers some slightly different content. It’s also free publicity as the guest writer is very likely to share your blog with their followers too.
- Comments on recent industry trends – Show that your company keeps up to date with current events in your sector.
- Engagement with your customers – Congratulate them on recent award wins or new business, this may encourage them to share your content and expand your reach.
- Sharing of relevant content from external sources – It’s always good to share interesting, relevant content from other people. This may even encourage them to share some of yours and increase your reach.
- Exciting native content - It’s important to not just post gated content that requires the audience to click through to another site. Host interesting pictures and videos on your news feed to maximise likes, comments and shares. When Facebook EdgeRank, the algorithm that determines what appears in people’s news feed, notices that lots of people are interacting with your content, it thinks that your brand is important to them, so it will start to show more of your content in their feed.
2. Follow your customers
You should follow your customers social media accounts to keep up to date with their current affairs, and subconsciously encourage them to follow you back.
Keeping an eye on changes to your customers businesses can help you offer additional products or services which may become relevant when they release a new product, move offices or even open a new store.
3. Ask questions
When people comment on posts, particularly on LinkedIn, their connections are notified, which of course increases your reach. Asking relevant questions related to the content you’ve shared is a great way of encouraging people to comment. These comments can form interesting conversations between your followers, which will encourage them to comment on future updates too.
4. Encourage your staff to engage
Ask your staff to like and comment on your company social media updates. This will share the update with some of their network, and encourage others to comment – nobody likes to be the lonely first commenter.
5. Create calls to action which lead to a landing page
To use your corporate social media as a method of generating leads, you can create offers or downloadable content, and give these in return for a prospective customers contact details, entered on a landing page on your website.
All in all, your social media accounts should be used as a tool to attract your target demographic with information that appeals to them, and entice them into clicking links to downloadable content. Worthwhile content should be safe guarded behind a landing page which gathers information about the visitor, and encourages them to sign up to your mailing list. This mailing list can then provide your subscribers with new content as it’s released, and offers or promotions to entice them to become a customer.
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