You can Google the definition of brand or branding and you will find ton of information on this. Branding is a quite in depth term and I am not going into details here. Here I am going to write what you should do when starting out social media marketing to enhance your brand.
Social media is proven to be a really powerful communication tool. Therefore, you should approach it properly because first impression do count.
Here is a deal!
Keep it simple and follow a easy to implement social media marketing plan.
What You Need Before You start
Here is the list of basic things you will need before you start. Keep these things ready to save lots of time while creating your social media presence.
1. Your Profile Picture (Professionally taken highly recommended)
2. Company Logo
3. Your and Your Company Bio
4. Facebook Page
5. You Tube Background
7. Gmail E-mail ID (Any E-mail will do but I prefer Gmail)
Start With These Channels
Below is the list of most important social media platforms you should ideally have your presence on as a small business. Action plan depends on your individual resources and knowledge of these platforms.
I would say take one step at a time and move to next platform once you understand one platform well. Social media is all about relationship not about numbers.
Blog
A business blog should be your hub (centre point) of your social media marketing efforts. Simply because self hosted blog is your asset and you own it fully, you can do with your blog whatever you want.
Rest of the social media profiles like Facebook page, twitter account etc, you don’t own these properties.
Therefore, your all marketing efforts should focus on driving traffic to your blog. Encourage your customers and prospects to communicate / socialise with you on your blog.
Facebook Page
You should go where your customers are. Simple!
Facebook has over 700 million active users. I am sure you will be laughing if you can hook fraction of this number as your customers or clients.
Start with Facebook business page, ideally get it designed professionally and find other pages and groups in your niche to socialise.
Share your knowledge and help the community to become authority in your field. Once you manage to do that, customer enquires will increase dramatically. You are guaranteed to fail if you try to do direct sales on social media.
Twitter Account
Twitter is a great place and really changing the way we are communicating.
- Get the twitter background design (Tell the world what you do)
- You can create twitter username as your business name, but in name section always use your real name
- Complete the twitter bio
- Find people on twitter search talking about your niche and chat with them
- Tweet tips, quotes, jokes (nice one), your latest offers.
Twitter is also really good for research.
LinkedIn is a Facebook of business people, you will find people talking about business only here instead sharing pictures and videos.
Not a lot of small businesses are using LinkedIn but if you have time, you should definitely consider it.
Google Listings
With the recent changes, local search has become really vital. Google listings is the ideal thing every business should have it. This is the easiest and cheapest way to get on top of Google within your local area.
Must have for every business.
You Tube Channel
Social media is all about sharing content for that you need content. Like blog posts, pictures and videos.
Videos are next big thing after face to face interaction and technology has made really easy to record short videos. You don’t need movie studio to record short 1 to 5 minute videos, you can easily do it with normal flip or Kodak zi8 camera.
You can ask few questions to your satisfied customers and record it as testimonials, you can do product or service reviews. Once you create these small videos upload to your youtube channel. Once you have uploaded the video to youtube you should then share all over the internet like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, basically where ever possible.
You should use same picture, bio and design on all your social media properties. These things will create your solid social media brand.
Your Views
How are you branding your business through social media? Any unique ideas? Feel free to share in the comments below
