For many small business owners, social media management is a daunting and seemingly time-consuming form of customer awareness. Even when they hear from other small business owners about how important social media is to their success, there is still a fair amount of scepticism about how impactful it is, especially if you work in a B2B industry.
There is no doubt that Social media is one of the most influential and cost-effective methods of raising your customer awareness and marketing your products or services available today. Social media engagement is projected to continue to grow exponentially, so it is something that small business owners cannot afford to ignore.
Lets take a look at some ways to leverage your social media effectively without it becoming all-consuming.
B2B social media strategy
In the interest of saving precious time, yet still building a professional and authoritative image for your business, the content that you share should be relevant and useful and your social media activity must remain consistent.
For business to business accounts it is highly recommended that you post daily, but the social media strategy that you use should be adjusted to the needs of your business. You cannot be there to post 24/7, so leveraging reliable social media management tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite will help you simplify the task of posting each day without actually having to do this manually.
Keep the momentum going! In the beginning, a company may be very enthusiastic about their posts, but the novelty soon wears off, leaving the company dead in the water with a silent feed after a few weeks of regular content. Going cold on your social media will not help to build your business credibility. If you are not producing fresh content online your credibility will take a huge nose-dive.
With regards to B2B businesses, going silent on your social media is never a good thing because potential buyers will often perform extensive research online before approaching anyone. If your businesses doesn’t appear credible to them because you are not active on social media and the last post you created was three months ago, they will not hesitate to move on to someone else to do business with.
Social proof goes a long way in business
Leaving a social footprint for a B2B client to follow is important. Many businesses have profited from being able to leverage their social media as proof of having an active and credible business. Having an active presence online will demonstrate to prospective B2B customers that you are forward thinking, connected, and have great insight into your particular business niche.
Depending on your customer demographics you will need to schedule your posts for times when your customers are most active on social media. Times may differ greatly if you are reaching out to a social audience, but if you are trying to attract other businesses, then the preferred posting times would be during regular business hours.
Content marketing strategy
Content Marketing is basically creating and circulating relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage your target audience. Most businesses will have a company blog, so sharing unique and fresh content from your blog will help to drive inbound traffic that will be more inclined to like and follow you on social media, produce leads and eventually buy from you.
Writing your own content may seem like such a time-consuming and daunting task, but you can successfully outsource our blog writing to a freelance writer or social media management company for a reasonable price, allowing you to focus your own time on other important tasks.
Sharing curated content from other reliable and credible sources will allow your business to provide value to your social media followers, and will help them keep up to date with all the latest news and insights from within your industry. Offering a fresh supply of content daily, whether that is original or curated, will encourage your followers to stick with you and become a loyal follower. They are also more likely to share your content to their own feed organically, which will help to increase your reach without too much extra effort on your part.
Consistency is key
We are not just talking about how often you post content here, but also about being consistent with your brand name too. To streamline your digital presence and further build your brand identity, stick to using the same or similar page names for your business blog and social media accounts. Having identical or very similar titles across your different social media accounts as well as your website will make it easier for people to search, discover and connect with you.
Also keep your company descriptions consistent across all of your mediums. This does eliminate confusion when people are searching for you, but also it will help your pages rank better for your business and further promote your business credibility.
