7 Easy Ways to Use Social Media to Help Grow Your Business

While social media marketing can be a great tool to raise awareness of your brand, promote your products or services, and ultimately increase your bottom line, it’s important to provide your followers with engaging, authentic content that resonates with their interests and shopping journeys. With the enormous amount of competition for consumers’ business, it is crucial to set your business apart from your competition by leveraging a few common sense marketing tools to attract more business. Here’s 7 easy ways to use social media to help grow your business.

1. Show up on social media

It’s all about being there. Seems obvious, but if you want your audience to pay attention to your brand, posting content that interests them is crucial. Creating posts that pique your audience’s interest in your products or services, with clear calls-to-action, such as offering a discount for a trending product or a new service or using a time-sensitive code can increase traffic to your physical store or your e-commerce site. Consistent and regular posts on your social media platforms can prove easier to manage if you plan your social media calendar to include blog posts, news about your business, promotional sales, customer reviews, and other areas of interest that continuously engage your customers.

2. Entertain your visitors

Everyone likes to be entertained and while you might not want to break out the cat videos, unless you’re a pet supply company or pet spa owner, creating engaging posts that educate and entertain your audience can lead to visitors sharing your posts with others, which exposes your brand to new audiences, expanding your brand awareness. Including upbeat, positive content that reflects your customer’s values, or expresses your values through images or quotes that align with your base’s interests give visitors a “feel-good” vibe that increases brain activity and improves their outlook on life.

Also, you can attract customers to engage more with your products by using augmented reality and smartphone filters that allow shoppers to try on your products, such as Warby-Parker’s virtual eyeglass frame feature, or Sephora’s virtual makeup feature.

3. Create good relationships by promptly responding to comments and questions

When visitors ask questions, answering them promptly does several things for your brand. For one thing, you’re acknowledging that you care about your customers and want to help them with their problem. When you can answer their questions, you immediately gain expert status in social media circles. If you can also provide insights, share your knowledge about the problem, or direct visitors to resources that may also help them, you build on your expertise, gaining followers that visit when trying to solve a problem you may have provided a solution for on your page. Additionally, acknowledging all comments about your business, good or bad, lets followers know that you’re paying attention to them. While the good comments help build your brand, trying to resolve issues addressed in any not-so-good comments, to your disgruntled customer’s satisfaction also goes a long way towards gaining trust and building loyalty for your brand. Visual content also attracts more awareness for your brand.

4. Everybody likes show and tell

Who doesn’t like a video that gives them ideas about how to make something or do something? As it turns out, we’re hard-wired to process visual content more efficiently than textual content. Studies show that:

• Visual information accounts for around 90% of the data transmitted to human brains
• Human brains can recognize images seen for just 13 milliseconds
• Visual content is viewed 94% more than text-based information
• People retain 65% of the information presented visually even after three days

So, in essence, video really can be your friend to attract more business to your social media platforms. Utilizing videos to show the steps involved in preparing a popular appetizer, if you’re a local eatery, or showing customers how to change the low-beam headlamps in their cars, if you’re a local auto parts supply shop are excellent ways to market your local business online! Also, showing and telling success stories helps grow your brand.

5. Sharing success stories provides more depth for your brand’s image

While you may keep your social media platform posts updated, regularly answering questions and offering solutions to any problems that arise, one of the best ways to engage potential customers focuses on you sharing success stories about your customers and colleagues, as well as customers sharing success stories about your products or services on your social media platforms. These success stories not only offer exciting social activity for your social pages, they provide potential customers the opportunity to get to know your brand better. These success stories make your brand more relatable, as followers can see themselves engaging with your products, just like customers in your videos are doing. Sharing success stories on your social pages ranks almost as important as endorsements of your products or services.

6. Endorsements and Reviews are key

Key to building your social media success lies in customers sharing their experiences about your products or services! Like word-of-mouth, when customers start talking about your business in positive ways, word gets around, and others will share their opinions of your products, as well. When consumers are interested in your products and want to get an unbiased opinion, they seek out reviews from actual customers that tell them what they want to know about your products. Endorsements and reviews build your social clout and help promote sales. Sometimes in-store customers will tell you how much they love your products or services. This is a great time to ask them if they could take a minute to go on your social platform and leave a review! Asking customers for a review can be awkward for some business owners, so why not make it easy for your customers, by integrating review software on your website or social page that consists of a one-click process that’s efficient, fluid, and straightforward. You can also offer customers discounts on products and services in exchange for reviews, such as:

7. Post Often and Authentically

Once you’ve built interest in your business, by giving your followers interesting and educational insights, along with entertaining videos and stories about your business in genuine and authentic ways, you want to keep the energy flowing by posting frequently, sharing other people’s posts, creating opportunities for your followers to weigh in with contests and opinion polls, and also creating content that inspires your audience to try out your products or services. Leveraging your social media to grow your business can seem like a lot of work, and it is, but the rewards are worth it.

Money Mailer offers marketing solutions for your local business, by using the best of print and digital components to deliver exclusive deals and savings to hyper-targeted clients in your local area! Contact Money Mailer to learn how we can help grow your local business!