I’m going to assume you’ve read my earlier blog about why your business needs to be on social media, or are already converted to the idea… (or if not, have a read here).
So, where do you need to be? There are so many sites out there, you can have a beautiful page which gets almost no traffic, because the people you want to see it are all on another site entirely. You need to do a bit of investigating to work out exactly where your customers hang out online, and the number of sites out there seems to grow daily, so it’s worth keeping an eye on this. Ask them. Go and have a rummage around the internet yourself. Google your competitors and see where they are.
Entry-level social media
Facebook is a good place for a general presence. You will find businesses and private individuals there, and if you can get a good number of followers, then you can introduce people to your services or products. You need to have a business page that’s distinct from your personal page. You can be kicked off Facebook for using your personal page for a business, so make sure you get it right. But business pages are really easy to set up.
Images
If you’re selling things that carry well visually, then a visual site is a good place to start. Jewellery, craft items, photography, clothes, cakes, canoe safaris, holidays, hairdressing… For these, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube are all good places to investigate. Look for people who are selling something like your products, and where you find them (if their pages look busy), then that’s somewhere you need to look at developing a presence for your business too.
You could argue that, ‘there are hundreds of jewellers on Pinterest; I’m going to put my business page somewhere else’. But there are hundreds of jewellers on Pinterest precisely because that’s where people hang out who like that kind of thing. You’d be daft to avoid it for that reason.
Business to business
If you want to sell business-to-business, you need to be on Linked In and Google Plus. This is where you will find the influencers, the directors, the professionals. You need to have a business-like presence there, minus the cat pictures, holiday snaps and, ‘OMG did you see what she was wearing?’
And what about Twitter?
Twitter is a strange place. It moves so fast that you can lose whole conversations if you’re not watching it like a hawk, and yet no-one can watch it 24-7 without also losing the rest of their life in the process. Twitter uses hashtags (#) to categorise conversations, so you can search for the hashtags that refer to your subject of interest. Ones that I keep an eye on include #English, #funwithwords and #GrammarMatters. #Failoftheday is also good for a laugh, unless it’s you on the receiving end! If you find a topic which is relevant to your business and trending (ie is THE topic of the moment), then you need to be on that bandwagon, and you could get tremendous exposure by being there.
Specialised forums
If you have a niche market, then there may be niche corners of the internet where people hang out that could be your customers. I know of Ravelry, for knitters, GoodReads, for bookworms, MapMyRun, for runners, but there are any number of forums for owners of specific cars or motorbikes, people who canoe, cycle, swim in the sea, are ex-Army, … you name it, there’s probably a forum for it. If these people could be customers of yours, for example Ravelry if you sell yarn, or keep alpacas, or design knitting patterns, you need to be on there too. Check out the paper magazines for your interest group, as they’ll have details of online meeting places which you could get involved with. Also, think sideways: if your product is for dogs, head for a horse-related forum, as horse-owners almost always have dogs, it seems.
This is an extensive topic, and I’ve really only touched the surface here. If you need some help working out where you need to be planting your business’s flag on social media, drop me a line, and we can chat, and then I can investigate for you, as well as helping you develop a strategy to make it work for you.
There will be other posts in due course about how often, and what you should be posting – so keep an eye on my page. Thanks for reading.