As a small business owner, you strive to succeed and grow your business each day. You are your absolute best to increase market share by working at the marketing strategies that you feel most comfortable with. When it comes to online marketing, you know you need a website, that’s a given. You’ve heard a lot about social media and how it can help your business as well.
Well, with social media, it of course isn’t enough to set up your FB page add a couple pictures and say that you are ‘doing social media’. That will set you up for failure.
Let’s talk about some ways you can effectively build rapport and trust using social media platforms.
BE SEEN AS AN EXPERT
You want to be seen as an expert by your followers or fans. You want them to look to you as somebody that knows the industry inside and out. How do you do it? By offering creative s
olutions to problems that they might have. Come up with status updates showing how your product or service can enhance the quality of their life or make their everyday routines easier than they are now.
ADD VALUE
Give free information with nothing expected in return. The client will see you as somebody that isn’t just in it for the money, but somebody that enjoys what you do and enjoys helping people. Make each person feel valued and appreciated. This will encourage other clients or prospective clients to participate in your discussion.
CREATE A BUZZ
Offer a product or service that is so good, that is so high quality, which is so unique, that word starts to spread. That people actively search you out looking to work with you. Social media is the ideal place to do this because of how fast word of mouth works on these platforms.
HOLD EVENTS
You want to have interaction and encourage people to share your page and your photo’s, etc. Encourage this by having giveaways or other events. This will make your page livelier and as a result, your followers should go up, helping you in your search engine rankings.
I think at times we make social media a lot harder than it needs to be. It is all about interacting and engaging with our fans or followers to expand our online presence. If you follow the four steps above you will be light years ahead of most small businesses that are dabbling in social media. Above all, the most important thing to remember for your small business social media plan to be successful is to be consistent. So many of your competitors will start working on social media, but they won’t continue if they don’t see immediate results. Don’t give up, keep at it, even if you don’t get sales overnight.
Do you need help implementing a social media strategy? Want somebody to completely take over your social media? Let’s talk, I can help.