SMM Cheat Sheet for Business
Having a wide experience in marketing, I can assure you that having a website of your business is not enough and social media presence is a must for a number of reasons.
What Social Media can do for your business
- Get advocates to talk about your products
- Drive traffic to your site
- Hold conversations with existing customers
- Find collaborative partners.
What? 845 million users social network where people create profiles, exchange messages and share content.
Why? It can help you to make a connection with your current and potential customers, promote your services, products, events; get a feedback; reach your target audience and expand it through friend networks.
How? Personalize your brand through your profile (putting face to the name is a good strategy, posting photos and/or videos will introduce your business and services to the audience); schedule Facebook posts (you can also use auto-posting through various blogging platforms like WordPress, etc.), engage into conversations to receive a feedback and adapt your services or product to client needs; analyze Facebook’s internal analytics tool data (it lets you see Total Likes, Friends of Fans, People Talking About This (total likes, shares, comments, etc. for your posts).
What? A microblogging service with 140 mln active users, allowing text-based posts of 140 characters.
Why? It helps raise awareness about your brand and generate additional new leads.
How? 78% of the engagement with a brand is through retweets so tweet often (by the way, engagement rates for brands are 17% higher on Saturday and Sunday; 30% higher interaction rates 8am – 7pm); use hashtags as they receive 2X more engagement, add images to tweets, ask followers to “Retweet”.
Google+
What? Google+ is a social network with more than 100 million users being an alternative to Facebook. Major early users are students, but there are also many companies represented.
Why? It allows to set contents visible to certain groups of contacts (Circles), allows sending video messages, allows group chats with up to ten people; sharing photos, videos, links is easier with Drag and Drop option.
How? Create an interest based Circles (i.e. Future Client Wishlist, Local Businesses, Industry Leaders, etc.); post interesting content and format your text to get your reader’s attention; share targeted content with relevant Circles.
I find this cheat sheet really helpful for understanding how Google+ works.
YouTube
What? A video-sharing site with user-generated content with 490 mln unique users.
Why? It is considered one of the best tools to build your brand by means of video blogging, reviews and tutorials.
How? Extremely easy: create your channel, post your video and share it through your other SM platforms, connect with customers by liking or commenting on user customer testimonials.
All in all, my advice is not to fume about all the channels but rather identify those that suite your business and invest more into them.
