Toolkits to Business success – Social Media

Toolkits to Business success – Social Media

What is a social media toolkit? It is a tool that has resources that you can use to update the public about what’s going on in your business and its strategies. It has information that can be used for social media marketing. The kit needs to have imagery and compelling story that will grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to share the initiatives with their family and friends. A toolkit should have the following essential elements;

• Stories and data

Use stories to engage with your followers. If you intend to solve a problem, you can engage people to air out the challenge they face with your products or services. Include also those who have benefitted with your business share their stories.  You can use their stories to shed light to represent your success or addressing your problems using statistics, graphs, and charts.

• Written contents

Have a brief message about your initiatives and any appropriate hashtags if it’s necessary. Simplify the process of writing by coming up with your content outlines.

• A video with your initiatives

this is a useful marketing tool to spread the campaign about your business on social media. You can create an informative video about your business, explaining your business’ objectives and goals. After that, you go ahead and upload the video to your convenient social media platform. Remember to ask your followers to share the video to spread awareness.

• Eye-catching photos

This is an effective and easy way to grab the attention of many followers. Add relevant images to your initiative by creating profile pictures and banners for your social media accounts. Take numerous photos for each action to help create responsiveness.

• Well-intentioned hashtags

You can use hashtags as an essential part of the social media toolkit to unite and build interest in the user-generated content to make your intentions known. You need to think of phrases and words that are related to your business’ image and add them to your toolkit. Remember to follow up on the progress of your initiatives by following the appropriate hashtags.

The above elements are essential for administering an effective non-profitable operation on social media. It is good to know how to manage your business channels on social media as it has become necessary for businesses of all sizes and shapes. All is required is knowing the intricacy needed to manage your social disbursement. Social media has developed over time with a broader range of tools to complement the platforms.

When a business wants to succeed in driving leads and sales from the people, you need to have a clear digital strategy incorporating social media. The businesses need to have a channel which can be able to operate the chains of their potential consumers. Before taking your business to social media, here are essential steps to follow for a successful social media marketing;

1. Have a Plan

Before everything, you should have a strategy for your social media marketing. For the business to be successful in driving leads and sales from social, consider having a digital strategy that is clearer to integrate social media. Each social network has a different demographic audience, and as a business, you should strategically select which medias outlet to utilize depending on the target consumers. These demographic differences include; Majority of online people use Facebook, thus becoming the top social network. Instagram users are most likely to be between 18 to 29 years old. There is Pinterest, which most of its users are women with high income and education. Think of your customers by defining the kind of personnel that is to purchase your services or products.  After selecting your social media channel, you can take a look at what your competitors are working on. This will enable you to create a calendar and help in the business organization, sticking to a regular social content schedule and planning.

1. Creating Quality Content

By having quality content, you can engage a bigger audience who can share it across multiple platforms and garner more interest in your brand.  For the content to have continuity in its reign, it’s good to know that your writing should have a piece of authoritative subject knowledge, medium, and a sense of humor. It is best to experiment with what works best for you, whether it turns out a failure or success. Good quality content should be; actionable, informative, relevant to the target audience, and shareable.

• Think Visually

Creating a picture in advertising your business is worth a thousand words. You should have noticed by now that seventy percent of activities taking place on Facebook revolve around images. The good thing with using images is you can secure most space available in social media, thus decreasing the chances of it being missed. As a marketer, you should think ahead of what posts to include with the image using a resourceful approach.

1. Be Responsive and Active

Consumers expect a company to respond to their comments on a social business site.  It is important to note that meeting is just not enough, as automating your response in a brand can lead to having adverse reactions. Consumers need to feel they are interacting with a human on social media and not getting an automated response, which could come out as uncaring.

1. Measure Metrics

We have hundreds of interactions on social media sites every other day. Although many businesses believe social media is essential, most don’t have a strategy for measuring that. It’s good to have a measuring metric. As one of the best ways of noting what to be improved and what is happening around. You should keep tracts of the increasing sales and brand consciousness.  In the end, you get to use them to adjust efficiency, which is the bottom-line of determining whether the digital marketing plan is working out.

What are these tools?

1. Hoot suite

With it, you can schedule updates on social media throughout the day in a broader range of platforms from a number of accounts. With hoot suite, sharing of knowledge on social media becomes an automated process, structured, and updates are planned time efficiently.  It suits businesses that are focused on marketing content, and those willing to share their leadership thoughts as hoot suite’s capabilities of content sharing are structured, planned, and timely.

2. Tweet reach

This model identifies the exposure and reaches a hashtag has while giving supplementary information about the hashtag timing and users. Hashtag usage has become prominent as twitter campaigns turning into a norm. Tweet reach can give you an average of how many people may have been potentially influenced and touched by your campaign. The tool is suited for any business intending to run a twitter campaign to be able to reach metrics and know everyone that was able to retweet and mention the hashtag.

3. Social Mention

It evaluates the key terms that are orbiting the social sphere on a variety of metrics like; source mentions, sentiments, associated keywords, and mentions. Social mention allows businesses to receive a high read on how they are socially perceived. If you can measure an aspect, you can improve it. The toolkit fits any business with a resilient social media existence. If your business is intending to be socially engaging and looking to measure, improve, and converse social media presence, social mention is an idea for you as you will be able to evaluate your presence.

4. Social Baker

It offers insight across a number of sectors, from politics to celebrities. The available data ranges from necessary information like the number of followers you got to detailed reports and market information. It is convenient for businesses with tight insight funds and stretched budgets. The toolkit delivers social media intellect at an affordable cost as compared with social media inquiry organization. Any company willing to use this toolkit should do an investigation. With the expanding social scope and clutter, social bakers help in giving a clearer picture and cutting through the mess.

5. Muck Rack

The toolkit is useful as it doubles the database of journalists on twitter. While giving an overview of what is being discussed by the journalists. It is an essential toolkit as the business is able to be presented favorably in discussion with power tweeters exposing it to a more substantial following. Muck Rack enables social media users to pursue journalists quickly, giving their approach an awareness to gain benefits. The toolkit is appropriate for any business that focuses on PR as their marketing channel.

After knowing what tools to use in managing your business online, it’s good to know what ways you can use for your business to stand out in social media. With a number of businesses and people being active on social media, it will be a little overwhelming to cope and come up with ways to cut off the noises. You need no vital hits but just simple ways to go about it. We will discuss seven ways below;

• Theming your account

This means you have to stick to a distinct approach to create a different look and feel using the same filters. This makes your account pleasing, setting the followers’ moods, and it is an excellent way of boosting your presence.

• Use the voice of your brand

You should try to be yourself, as this is the easiest and quickest way for your business to stand out on social media. Although it might be a process in nailing your voice brand, it’s worth it as it will help you in standing out from your competitors and get to attract the right followers on your social channel.

• Have strong visuals

You should be able to use images and videos which are of high quality and clear to reflect the feel of your brand. You should aim at being creative and exploring with your pictures more unexpectedly, like using grid images and puzzles images on Instagram.

• Write captivating captions

As we have talked about theming and branding your voice, the way you will tell out your brand story should be to add visual context with captions. Try to make the caption compelling while you add value to the audience. Do this by creating a conversation, not speaking to them.

• Use network tools

By use of network tools, you are trying to help your business stand out on social media as it adds your presence in it. Learn how each network operates like twitter lists, twitter polls, live videos, and any other tools at your disposal for a specific social media network. Learning about the tools will help you with being creative and putting them into use.

• Create repetitive posts

One way of helping your business grow and stand out is by posting recurring events. This is to create something that will give consumers something to come back for after a week or two. It is one of the best ways in which you can use to be creative, adding value, showing some little personality, and a way to connect with your audience.

• Have a scheme in place

Lastly, having a strategy is the most important way to help your business to stand out on social media. This is because having a strategy will give you an outline of how to be creative; it will ensure that you are also on the right track with your competitors, and you will get prepared for what is coming up. At the end of it all, social media is a marathon and being consistent with being successful.

Importance of social media for business success

It’s important to note that for your business to grow, it needs the presence of social media. No matter how small or big your business is, an essential business marketing strategy is social media. It helps you in creating awareness about your business, boosting your sales and leads. It also helps you to connect with your customers. Here are the reasons why using social media is essential to your business success.

• It builds awareness

It makes your business be known to your customers as it boosts visibility to your potential customers. You are able to reach a broad audience using a great extent of effort and time. You have to keep your strategy specific by defining what you want to get on social media. Is it bringing more local consumers to your shop? Do you want new customers? This way, you will be able to know which social media channel is beneficial to your businesses.

• Communicating authority

Customers are discerning on which business to support online. All they have to do is taking a quick search on your social media and website. What are they going to find on your website? Will it be an empty storefront or resourceful information? You need to frequently update your profile with relevant information, which will help in building your brand authority and making sure you get the first impression on social media. This will show that your business is approachable, trustworthy, and knowledgeable.

• Encourage engagement

Social media evolves each passing day, releasing new features, and this can be intimidating at times to business owners. You don’t have to do everything but permit yourself to learn. How to connect with the new ways of connecting with your audience. You can host a quick question and answer session on Facebook live video streaming. The next day you can post a series of stories on Instagram. This way, you will have a better understanding of your followers’ preferences.

• Showing authenticity

You should let your brandings shine in everything you share on your social media. You should try to be you in everything you do. Followers like knowing the real person behind your social profile. Don’t make your business have corporate-style and dry posts. This way, your customers won’t be interested.

• Grow affordably

Your business has the privilege of growing its audience and achieving its objectives. Through advertisements on the social system like Instagram and Facebook, regardless of its budget and size. Using social media in marketing is costly, and not everyone can afford the vast campaigns. This doesn’t have to be demanding to manage. All you have to do is creating a profile and start appealing to your customers.

• Provides support

Social media has carried down the barriers existing between customers and companies. Instead of solving their problems by calling customer service lines, they instead turn to Twitter or Facebook to find the information they want. You need to develop your business as caring, responsive personnel by giving support on social channels. You can do this by;

• Quickly responding to concerns and questions
• Be helpful and positive
• Know when it is appropriate to respond to customers using private messages
• Create a tracking system for customers’ problems, complaints, and comments on social media.

• Staying on top of mind

Social media gives you an opportunity to interact with your fans when they get to log in. You just need to keep your posts updated, and they should be informative and knowledgeable. This way, your customers will be able to see the updates on their news feed, thus keeping you in mind always.

• It boosts sales

It doesn’t matter what you are trying to sell, but social media will help you sell it. With the growing number of social media users and social sales tools evolving, social networks have become a critical e-commerce tool and product search.

• You get to go viral

Your social posts and content get to go viral to the new audience when people start liking, sharing, and commenting on it. As people get to spread your posts across the internet, it gets a thousand shares. It’s not easy to go viral, but it’s worth a try with social media.

• Boosts customer-audience engagement

Social media gives you an opportunity to interact with your customers and fans directly. On the other have it provides the audience with a chance to interact with your brand. You can stay active in responding to your customers’ questions and comments on your post.

Social media trends to boost your business

When it comes to reaching a broad audience and creating awareness of your brand, social media gives tons of possibilities, thus being a suitable marketing platform. You need to understand social media trends, which will boost your business. They include;

• Personalized content

The very last thing you will want from the audience interacting with your brand has content that doesn’t deliver value. You should focus on giving the audience a unique content which is knowledgeable and entertaining. This will get many people engaging in your posts. Make use of analytic data to guide your marketers and use graphic designers to get content personalized for your audience. This way, your creativity level gets boosted.

• Platform feature overlap

Involves using different platforms to showcase an event or brand. You can either use Facebook and Instagram or WhatsApp in the same engaging content. The only difference here is audience interaction and reach. You might be having an active audience on Facebook, why not let them know about your new project? But wouldn’t you like your audience on Instagram to know about the same? Yes, this is where the overlapping of social media comes in. To some, Instagram does perform well when it comes to living viewing of stories than the other platforms. With social media handles offering almost the same features, it got salespersons to be selective; use analytic to identify what kind of social media will be the best for you.

• Messaging through social listening

It would be a good thing if you got yourself engaging with your online audience as most would like to have a good listener to open up. You may find some who would like to interact with you on a daily basis, and you need to communicate with them. This will boost your social media presence as it will get many mentioning your brand in their communication.  This is best than checking what your competitors are doing. Communicating with your audience is the right way as it shows how approachable you are comfortable, and you do care about suggestions and recommendations. This will help to build the identity of your brand.

• Taking advantage of videos

Videos are popular as they do make a resilient place in online content. They are engaging and helps in building a broad audience. Thus you need to include additional in your strategy. Get out of your relaxing zone, be creative, and make some fantastic videos to engage your customers as videos do receive a good response, especially on Facebook. As you will get several users, looking, commenting, and sharing them, and with them much, they do that, the more popular it gets.

• Responsive social content

Your social content should be responsive and mobile-friendly as most platforms like Facebook is becoming mobile accessible. By being sensitive means that your content should be available by whatever mobile device one uses, either a phablet, smartphone, or tablet. The content delivery should be experienced the same across all the users. Most of the users are turning to their mobile phones, and media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and WhatsApp are adapting to the mobile parameter; you can imagine the users you will get to engage with.

• Leveraging influencers

You need to treat your followers as your partners and be able to take help from them to be able to create awareness. You need to create a strategy on how to work with few influencers, either video creators or bloggers, to create meaningful content for your business. Some influencers are not only useful in driving your brand awareness but also creating appealing content with videos that will appeal to your audience.

• Live stream

All social media platforms are working on making live streaming functional. With Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you are able to live stream to your audience as a personal account or business, and they will be notified about your live streaming through the live streaming function.

Social media gives an opportunity for your business brand to connect with the audience, create and distribute relevant content. You first need to understand that the trends frequently happen, so you should always stay ahead.

What are the most effective social media sites for your business?

When you take the chance of investing your business on social media, that’s a great choice you have chosen as social media be one of the cheapest marketing forms present. It doesn’t matter what social media platform you want to use; at the end of the day, you would have engaged with the audience you didn’t know of. We are going to discuss a wide range of social media sites appropriate for businesses that will be profitable to business owners like you;

1. Facebook

It is a widely used and famous social platform, with over three billion users daily. Depending on your business strategy, whether online conversation, lead generation, or website traffic, Facebook gives a remarkable transformation in achieving your goals. Anyone trying to use it can be sure of getting a more significant number of audiences. Its advertising platform is more developed than other social platforms. Facebook gives you the power to target your audience according to their age, relationship status, gender, and interests.

1. Instagram

It comes after Facebook as a social site for business. Owned by the same person who owns Facebook, it is an excellent platform for businesses with or without a budget in their advertising. It is a visual platform where you can publish your posts with images and videos. This be an advantage to your business as people tend to remember more about what they see that what they read

• Pinterest

It is a social media platform on which if you fall under the creative industry or your business caters mostly for females. This platform allows businesses to plan their content strategically to contain words that are searched a lot here without having to spend any coin.

1. Snapchat

With snap chat, you are able to share snap photos directly to another user, but when the Snapchat is on a story like a business story, it will be visible for twenty-four hours before it disappears. When your targeted audience is of a younger demographic, then the best platform to use is Snapchat. It also offers options in advertising on which you have to pay to have a linkable Snapchat in the discovery Snapchat section.

1. YouTube

This is a video platform that allows one to upload and watch videos. It has a unique stance of being owned by Google, thus giving one an advantage to use it in running YouTube advertisements. With YouTube, you can use proper keywords to search for your business or company video as its optimized.

1. Twitter

It is the oldest media site, with over 335 million active monthly users. You get to post videos and photos with a limited personality copy. An excellent platform for engaging with potential new consumers through the use of hashtags.

• LinkedIn

As a business platform, people using it do update accurate information about their job position, employers, and a relevant email address, more of which they cannot do on other media sites. It targets the audience according to their job titles or if your business follows the B2B ideal.

Why social media works for business

Social media. Its something you hear about every day; you see hashtags and social sharing used everywhere. We shouldn’t mistake this as a trend but the way of our culture. It evolves and advances each passing day. In this post, we are going to see why it is used for businesses and how it works.

Why does it work?

Social media works because it is versatile and widely used. It supports a wide range of media and can be used for any topic you think of in this life. When it comes to business, it works because of its visual element, convenience, and targeting.  Let’s look at them one by one;

• Targeting

With social media, you get to target the appropriate audience, gender, religion, and age of your posts and advertisements. It works for it allows you to reach a new audience and makes sure you are not wasting your time on a group that is not interested in your ideas.

• Convenience

We get people consuming information in different ways. With knowledge, people like to know quickly and then. This is appropriate as social media meets our expectations by giving us content we are interested in immediately, on time, and b able to digest it quickly through its bite-sized contents.

• Visual element

Having posts with images is the best way to work out your content. No one likes boring images or content. You need to be creative with your visual content to encourage a broader range of audience to view your business ideas. It is essential in marketing as your consumers get to learn about your features, culture, and benefits as they can see, experience it, and be a part of it.  Social media is convenient for your business as images get to increase the attractiveness and appeal of your business, its posts, and products, thus making you more transparent.

Why use social media for business?

You use it because it gets to improve the quality, frequency, and reach of their targeted audience. It is a quick way to promote your business events and sales. It cultivates and builds your network both personally and professionally. You are able to develop the relationship between your consumers and influencers. You get to generate new leads to your business sales ultimately. Other reasons include;

• You market from anywhere

One of the real benefits of using social media for your business is you can go anywhere with it; you can be telling people of how your business promotion while having your hair done. The company uses social media as a mode to promoting its products, educating its customers, and giving reviews of their business from anywhere.

• Connecting with your target audience

Social media gives you a platform on which you are able to communicate and engage with your audience immediately and directly. Be a part of your social audience, not just marketing your business. By interacting with them, you get to learn how to be better, you learn about them and deepening your interaction with them

• Let users market for you

Social media is a platform packed with people waiting to sell your business for you! By getting likes, comments, and shares on your post, it is a way of spreading a word to their followers about your business and encouraging them to like and share too. Social media does not involve th4 lists of friends and families, and it has become widespread, thus being used by people to obtain information, meet their needs, and making decisions. This will be all about how you use social media and not why.

• A way of competition

A number of companies are investing more on social media, and it will be a good thing if you keep up with the digital marketing tactics which are being advanced. To be able to boost your traffic, you need to be ahead of your competitors while giving your customers the best products.

• Find customers

Use of keywords and hashtags are essential as they help you in identifying potential audience interested in your products. Upon getting the, you can redirect them to your account to find out more about your business.

• Informative

Social media gives you the highlight of the market and issues affecting it. It gives you the contact to what your competitors are up to. It also informs you of what consumers are posting online about specific services and products.

Why your business needs a social media strategy.

• To build a strong organic presence

The first reason in having a strategy for your business is because you need to develop a strong presence. This way, you will be able to schedule and set out plans on your posts and events in advance, which will help you to stick to the social media rule of posting consistently.

• To save your time

A social media strategy for your business will help you in saving time, as everything you engage in should be in your calendar. You should be able to save yourself the time of staring blankly at your screen, trying to figure out what to do and post. Setting everything on a schedule in your content bank and calendar is the first step in saving yourself the time to do other useful tasks.

• To make sure all your goals are covered

The social media strategy in place will enable your efforts on the media to be fruitful in supporting your business goals. Having a plan at hand means drawing your business goals and going back to work on them by creating posts that highlight them.

• To target your audience more effectively

You can decide to engage your audience in the open ended questions to get a better understanding of how to handle them and on how to provide a solution to their underlying problem. This should be strategized to target your audience excellently

• To leave room for creativity

Social media gives you the light on which elements, network, and methods that work for your business. With a strategy outlining your goals, it will help in creating content that fits your audience, allowing you to think of how creative you can be with the content you intend to post.

• To stay ahead of the competition

A social media strategy is necessary as it will enable you to stay ahead of the competition. Following all the details we have mentioned of having a plan on your daily posts will give you time to concentrate on the fine details that will help you stand out from everyone else.

Using social media as a platform to engage and reach your consumers, build a brand awareness are some of the necessary steps of social media in your business. However, to avoid getting negative aspects, be careful about tips that you follow, and suggest when sharing your content on any social media channel.