Social media: Where should your small business start?

Face Book? YouTube? Linked IN? Twitter? Pinterest? Instagram?

Lots to explore but where to START!

Although every audience is different, there are a few very general guidelines to help you start to consider what social-media networks to use for your small business.

Facebook

•         Company: B2C, socially responsible, community-oriented, has an established brand, client stories that can be shared publicly — stories that have changed lives, competition/partners/vendors using Facebook successfully now, products/services are experiential, addictive, fun and/or have a social element associated with how they are used, actively participates in events.
•        Goals: brand awareness, deeper connections with existing buyers, achieve a new customer service channel, recruiting, share behind-the-scenes details about the people behind your company, raise awareness about a social issue, develop a personality and voice for your brand, improve a poor brand image, identify brand ambassadors.
•       Target: ages 18-55, slightly more women.

Twitter

•          Company: I believe any company can use Twitter successfully. Yet there are a few types of companies that may really excel in this network for different reasons. Use the same description as Facebook; yet add B2B, have senior level employees (and/or experts, celebrity-types) already active on Twitter, have a specific target list of potential clients, sell products/services around a timely event or “happening now” kind of thing (emergency/catastrophe services such as hurricanes), highly event-oriented, entertainment/news/media-related.
•          Goals: customer service, search-engine marketing, direct relationship sales, competitive intelligence gathering, develop PR-type relationships with media personalities, event-triggered selling, event-related promotions.
•          Target: under 50 (mostly 18-29), famous or well-known, media types, early adopters, urban residents, African-Americans.

LinkedIn

•          Company: B2B does particularly well here, long sales cycles, relationship selling, has a specific expertise in any area of business.
•          Goals: Industry expertise development and awareness, niche development, recruiting, competitive analysis, direct and indirect prospecting, prospect research, sales, business development, industry partner development, dealer/re-seller/franchise sales, buyer qualification, building and maintaining a business network with up-to-date contact information.
•          Target: professionals in many parts of the world 23-70, male, IT professionals were the early building blocks of LinkedIn, senior-level executives at the enterprise level, business owners, decision-makers, income over $75,000, college educated.

Google Plus (g+):

•          Company: marketing, technology, creative, gaming, Internet products and services, e-commerce, virtual work force.
•          Goals: search-engine optimization, authorship-status in the search engines (your picture shows up!), reach a technology-driven male population, not be left behind by Google and its powerful ability to make or break us online, expertise development for search marketing purposes.
•          Target: mostly technology affiliated males 18-34.

Pinterest

•          Company: image-driven products and services like interiors, fashion, beauty, landscape, architecture, plus e-commerce sites have benefited.
•          Goals: drive traffic to a website, showcase work, build a digital brand, e-commerce.
•          Target: women under 50, white, some college.

How to know where your customers are:

If we’re talking purely platform, you have to go where your audience is hanging out. Figure that out by asking your customers through a platform like SurveyMonkey. Monitor hashtags, influencers, and blogs that are already in your arena. Often your front-line sales associates can help uncover this information.

For example, an engineering firm might find it best to join and actively participate in related industry forums, LinkedIn groups and blogs. An interior designer or hair stylist might post lots of photos on Pinterest.

If you’re in retail, you’ll likely spend most of your time engaging and harvesting good interaction on Facebook, Pinterest, and even Instagram these days. For B2B, join LinkedIn groups, learn Google+, and build your Twitter lists if you’re a well-connected thought leader with a solid professional or “personal” brand.

Of course, all of this needs to drive back to something you really own that can have a long-term presence. Get your blog up and running and commit to posting regularly (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly), based on some kind of “content calendar.”

Get the blog integrated with your main website — and it with your platforms.

There’s a tendency to think you have to be on every platform out there. The fact is, you can’t manage every platform and make them scream results all the time. This is especially true as a small business. You just don’t have the manpower or time. So, as I said — go to where your audience is and master that platform.

Talk to Digikraf to initialize Social Media Services in Thane Mumbai today!

About Digikraf

Digikraf is Social Media Marketing Company Thane, Mumbai offers best Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing Solutions for all business firms.

We also Provide Search Engine Marketing Services in Thane, Mumbai.

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