Having a business nowadays means that you need to be online and be present. This can become a daunting task for those new to the world of social media and the world wide web. From deciding which social media sites to be on, as well as how to keep it all up to date, you could easily become overwhelmed and frustrated. The Minimalist Guide to Social Media for Business series is here to help you understand it all and feel comfortable using it.
Pick Your Battles
Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, and Pinterest are just a few of the choices you can start promoting on when promoting your business. The question is, which one?
At minimum, a good recommendation is to pick at least two of these social media outlets. If think you have enough content for them all and can gain followers to your promotions, then by all means, do them all. However for most people, 1) we don’t have enough time in the day and 2) they aren’t all necessary or applicable to our business.
Example
A person owning a bakery would probably benefit most from being on sites such as Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook the most. These would allow them to post pictures of their creations because obviously food is a visual art as much as it is for a person’s palate. Getting people to see your delicious looking food will make them salivating to want to potentially order items from you or even further, read your recipes on your website if you were posting it. You could easily kill three (or four) birds with one stone with a few steps. The first would be setting up an account with Pinterest and installing the pin it button. From there you would setup and install Instagram on your mobile device, snap photos of your cakes, cookies and pies, and then share from Instagram to Facebook (or Twitter if you have it setup). After you have done this, you can set aside separate time to logon your Instagram page from your web browser and use the pin it button to share to Pinterest.
Example 2
A person owning a traveling fitness bootcamp would probably benefit most from being on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These sites would allow them to promote their classes on a Facebook page where they could post videos or photos of their workout (which could also be shared from Instagram) and then have these posts auto-tweet to Twitter so others know where you will be that day, what work out tips you have for them or examples of recent workouts you’ve done.
There is definitely a lot more to know than just all of this and in future posts of this series, I will go through how to setup each account as well as how it all works. Future information will also include tips on social media time management and tools you can use to help you with this. For now though this is just one example of why and how social media can be used. While there are many reasons why you should be on some or all of these sites, I believe the most important is for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. This topic will also be discussed more in the future so stay tuned to The Minimalist Guide to Social Media for Business.
3 Action Steps:
1. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Would a consumer feel more connected from seeing a video or image of your product or business? If so, maybe Instagram, Youtube, or Pinterest would be good for you.
- Do you have free tips or information you can offer consumers? If so perhaps choose Facebook or Twitter.
- Do you have a physical location? You might want to check out Google Plus, Yelp or Foursquare
- Do you get most of your clients or referrals through B2B networking? LinkedIn is a great social platform for that.
2. Familiarize yourself with the sites – click on the links above or just type one of them into your search engine to go to any of the social media sites. Browse around and see what people are doing on there (Instagram has to be setup from a smartphone). We will discuss more on setting up each one to most benefit you in future posts.
3. Be consistent across all sites – If you haven’t already setup an account (we will show steps on how to do this in future posts), once you have one, be consistent across all social platforms. Use the same graphics, tag lines and style.
