Social media isn’t just a great way to keep up with your friends and family. It can also be a great way to promote your business!
Promoting your organization on social media can help grow your customer base, gain more exposure and showcase your business. The best part about it is that marketing on social media costs very little and could even be free!
Here are some steps on how to establish your business’s social media presence and use it as a low-cost way of effective marketing:
- Set-up your accounts
There are many different social media sites you can choose from to market your business. The most important part is choosing the social media platform that meets your needs. Here are some ideas of how you can use various existing platforms:
- If you’d like to post promotional images, videos and graphics to your account, Instagram and Facebook might be your best choice.
- If you are trying to expose yourself to a younger demographic through short videos, TikTok might be your best bet.
- LinkedIn is another good option as you can gain attention from fellow businesses as well as potential future employees.
- Twitter is also a good choice for any of those needs.
It is important to pursue further research and understand how each social platform works and pick the ones that best fits your needs and the demographics of your customer base.
- Make content
If you are going to promote yourself on social media, you need to create content!
The type of content you make also depends on what purpose you want your socials to serve. You can make graphics with products, pricing or other information to inform potential customers of the services you provide. You can also use your content to show off your company’s workplace environment. You can post pictures of corporate parties, outings, or accomplishments.
There are free, easy to use websites and apps to make such graphics. Canva is a free to use graphics creator with customizable templates for whatever information you want to convey. Canva also has a paid subscription with more features if you have the budget for it.
If you are unsure of where to start, scout the accounts of similar businesses to see what they post.
- Promote your socials
To attract attention and followers on your socials, you need to let people know you have them!
One way this can be done is by placing signage with your social media accounts and QR codes that will bring people to your accounts. This is a good option if you have a store front.
Another way to bring people to your account is by linking them to your website. Most websites can embed social media accounts in them. This way, once people go onto your website, they are also exposed to your social media accounts.
The easiest way to attract followers to your accounts is by following other businesses nearby. Following fellow businesses will not only establish a friendly relationship between you and the other businesses, but it will enable the social media algorithms to suggest your account to the other business’s followers. You should also find out if your town of location has a local community page. Posting on that page instantly exposes you to many new clients and customers.
- Consistency is key
You need to make sure you are consistently posting on your socials to continually expose your followers, customers and clients to new services, happenings or information about your business.
You don’t need to post every day but come up with a routine of how frequently you will post. It all depends on what you think is most feasible and works best for how you are using your social media accounts.
- Have a budget for marketing? Try ads!
All of these tips can help you market your company for free on social media. However, if your company has money budgeted for marketing, you should consider purchasing social media ads.
Ads on Instagram and Facebook, for example, are fairly inexpensive and pop-up in users’ feeds just like a normal post. You can even have these ads link directly to your social media account.
If you don’t have the financial flexibility to pay for ads, don’t worry, you can be just as effective marketing your business on social media using the other tips.
Make your move
Social Media is a great and inexpensive way to market your business and attract new clientele.
The best advice when starting to market on social media is to start small and manageable. Set-up one or two accounts and create a system for running them that is doable for you and your team.
Once you begin to reap the benefits of social media marketing, you can expand your social media operations and expose your business to even more people.
