SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSINESS

December 29, 2020 4:05 am | Posted in Opinions | Share now TwitterFacebook

Great question! The first thing to remember is that not every post should be a promotional effort for your business. Social Media users will switch off very quickly if all you do is advertise to them repeatedly.

There’s an old adage: “You have two ears and one mouth, use them in proportion”. This is very true with Social Media. The best value can be obtained by listening to what your target audience are saying and why they are saying it. From here, you can craft content that will resonate with your audience.

The most important tip we can share with you is that people are using Social Media for their own interests. Whilst they may “follow” your business on a particular

platform, they typically didn’t load it up on their computer or mobile device just to read your latest updates.
You need to be creating content that talks about their problems, their wants, and their needs.

Your business provides products or services that solve problems for your audience. For example, you may offer a physical service such as roofing or landscaping, you may have an online store that sells handicrafts, or you may be a bungalow or tour operator.
Whatever it is that you specifically sell, your customers are purchasing your products or services based on their wants and needs. Therefore

your content should be carefully crafted around this.
You don’t want to blindly post industry jargon, technical details or features. These aren’t helpful for your audience.

Instead, focus on what it is that helps your audience to make a buying decision. If you can deliver education and valuable information first, the sales conversation can follow this.
Highly valuable posts will have more engagement from your audience and you can find these shared to an even wider audience too. Sometimes you’ll find a post can go “viral” which is where it is heavily shared online.

You’re not going to always reach people who are ready to purchase from your business. This is true with any content you create or marketing activities that you carry out. Delivering education and value, whilst positioning yourself as an expert gives you the best opportunity to have future sales conversations.

TIP: Make a list of common problems that your customers typically suffer from. Think about how you can provide education and value to your audience on these topics. Remember that you can repurpose content you’ve written previously into Social Media posts.

One of the smartest things that you can do with your content is to use it more than once. Every piece of content that you create for your business can have more than one use.
This is known as repurposing. You’ll often hear content repurposing fall under the banner of “Content Marketing”.

Whether you’ve written a blog post, newsletter, Social Media post, recorded a video, recorded a podcast, written an article for another publication or any other piece of content… it can be used again in another format!
Here are some examples of ways you can repurpose your existing content for use on Social Media:

• Blog Posts – You and your team have likely already created some great blog posts for your business. You can re-use these on Social Media either as short posts or you can take quotes from the articles and direct users to read the blog posts for more information.
• Newsletters – If you send out a weekly or monthly newsletter to your audience already, take a look back through your past emails. There will be content there that you can repurpose and post on Social Media.
• Brochures / White Papers – Your brochures, white papers and other publications that your business has created are ideal for taking short quotes from and re-using on Social Media. Just bear in mind that if the content is of a technical nature, you’ll want to edit it to make it easily understandable and jargon-free.
• Videos – Not every business creates videos, but if you do, make sure you take clips from the videos that you create and post these on Social Media. Video engagement is typically a lot higher than a text post, so this is something that can be very beneficial for your business.
• Podcasts – If you record podcasts or audio interviews, you can take snippets from these and post these on Social Media. Use a tool like Headliner to create short videos with your audio content. These will get better engagement from your followers on Social Media.

Aside from Social Media, remember that your content can be repurposed between all of these different mediums (and more). One blog post, for example, could easily be turned into a dozen social media posts, 2-3 videos, the basis for a podcast, a series of newsletter emails and more.

TIP: Review your existing content and look for content that is educational, valuable or interesting for your target audience. Plan how you can repurpose this and speed up your Social Media content creation.

If you would like to get more tips on setting up your social media accounts, sizing images, planning and speeding up the posting process and reaching more people online be sure to download the full Polinet guide on Social Media here https://www.polinet.website/social-media/

This was the first article in the series of digital marketing advice for Vanuatu. Let us know if you liked it and what other topics would you like to see covered in the future guides in the monthly Vanuatu Business Review at https://www.polinet.website/business-review/
Written by Polina from Polinet – on a mission of advancing Vanuatu digital development.