Social media is gigantic, and across all channels, there are more people out there actively engaged on social than the population of China and India combined. According to BrandWatch, there are over 2.3 billion active social media users and more than 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media accounts to help sustain their brand presence.
About a million new active mobile social users are added everyday (that’s about 12 each second).
Facebook now has over 1.65 billion users. Google+, LinkedIn,Twitter and WeChat have 300, 300, 320 and 800 million users each,
Social media is too important for your business to avoid, but it’s still not “media” in the traditional sense.
As Jay Baer of convinceandconvert puts it, “There’s social in social media” and that’s the central theme of strategic use of the social web for business.
First, a few rules:
1. Spamming is not only allowed on social but it also ruins your reputation.
2. Get social on your networks – manage small talk, make small conversations, and always respond to others.
3. Strive to build your network. Really get to know people, on a first name basis.
4. Share content that you publish (on your blog) and others’ content that relates to your business niche.
5. As for generating leads, develop a systematic workflow that helps you make sense of the chaos that social is. For instance, on rare occasions that you promote your product or service, send social traffic to a landing page.
As a business, here’s what social media can help you grow your business and drive sales (and it’s just now how you think it’d work):
Gain Branding & Impressions
On social networks such as Twitter, magic happens when you start using hashtags within your regular updates. Much like an open room full of people, your Tweet updates with hashtags are like public announcements.
Everyone gets to see what you update, and this is what gets your twitter handle (which is also your business name on Twitter) a lot of impressions.
How does that look like, you ask? Here’s a sample:
In the example above, you’ll notice that it’s a relatively new twitter account but you can see how impressions, number of tweets, profile visits, mentions, and followers grow over time just by keeping your social account active.
Build Relationships
It’s easy to start putting up a string of updates on social media networks, but that won’t fetch you much. Instead, focus on both updates and also building real relationships. As a business, you’ll have a lot of people already mentioning and talking about your brand.
If not, people would talk about the particular problem you solve with products and services. Get talking, provide help, share insights, and work to get to know them on a first name basis.
40:30:20:10 Principle
Of course, you are on social because you want to generate leads for your business. By boosting your branding and impressions, more people get to know about you thereby increasing your chances for generating leads. Then, the actual relationships you build will also help build your pipeline.
To get even better results, use the 40:30:20:10 principle, and this is how it works:
Out of your daily set of social media updates:
- 40% of the updates should be content that you believe is interesting for your fans and followers.
- 30% of the updates should your own content ( blog posts, infographics, other media)
- 20% of the updates can include engagement, small conversations, and more.
- Only 10% of your total updates should be directly related to generating leads, ads, and more.
Social media demands a lot from you and can only deliver if you keep at it for long, without expecting much from it – that’s the nature of the beast.
How do you use social media for your business? Tell us all about it.
