Choosing the right Social Media Tools for your business

Should your company have a presence on all or any of the popular social-media networks? The answer is yes - but if you are new to social media marketing begin with a presence on just one social network, at least for the first few months. The key question to ask yourself is “where am I likely to find my potential customers?”

What are the best social networks for small businesses?
There are hundreds of social media sites that you could sign up to and the key to success is not to sign up to everyone you hear about. Whether your company is large or small, you can't go wrong with a Twitter account but Twitter takes a bit of getting used to.  If your business is aimed at B2B – you need to be on LinkedIn and for B2C companies, we would suggest Facebook and for businesses selling products (as opposed to services) Instagram.

Next you need to develop an effective social media content strategy

• You need to know what your customers, audience or community want to talk about and be willing to engage in those conversations.
• You need to know where your audience wants to have these conversations; in other words, where they “hang out” online.
• You need to measure the results of your conversations to see what works best for you.

Don’t even start a social media marketing campaign until you set some goals.
What do you want the campaign to do? 

What results do you want to see?

To make it very simple, set yourself these targets:

Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement is TweetReach.

Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach.  Facebook Insights will provide you with the information you need.

Your Blog: Measure the number of visitors who have viewed your blog posts

There is so much more that you can do to improve your online presence but if you start with our suggestions you won't go far wrong.

If you need help with setting up your social media platforms or perhaps you would like to know more about which ones are right for your business then get in touch with Sunflowerva today.