Are You Using Your Social Media?

If you run a small business and you’re trying to use social media to promote yourself, remember that you have some remarkable advantages over larger businesses in this regard. Larger businesses have to navigate the tricky waters of coming up with posts that get people engaged and maintaining their brand image. For smaller businesses, the fact that you probably do business in a physical community and there is a face that people associate with your business can be real advantages. You just have to make sure you’re using it right. 

Bad Stats 

There were revealed some facts about social media that may apply to your business. For instance, a survey referenced in the article found that 58% of companies that were actively using Facebook didn’t feel like they were promoting it the way they should be. It is understood that most small businesses out there probably have a social media profile. Except for the time invested in making the profile, it is essentially free, at least from an upfront investment.

The same article, however, shows that 76% of small businesses surveyed about the matter found that they got positive results from using social media. A full 78% of the people who responded about their businesses said they got 25% to 100% of their customers via social media. That should reveal the power potential in this type of promotion, if you had any doubts.

How do you go about using it, however? Here are some creative ways that you can go about using social media to promote your business. Remember that they do require something of an investment, whether that is in terms of time or simply offering an incentive to customers who help you out.

Incentivize

There are various ways you can incentivize using social media. For example, if you happened to run a fitness center, you could offer a free beverage or some other incentive if people are willing to check in when they show up for a workout. This helps to get the word out about your facility, particularly to people who may be friends of some of your clients but who aren’t particularly interested in following your business. It gets your name out there and that’s important.

You can also offer an incentive for people to like your business. This is easy enough to do. If you have regular customers, clients or a membership driven business, ask them to like you on Facebook as a way of promoting the business. They are already your customers, so some sense of loyalty may apply here, particularly if you are a small business and the person they see behind the counter when they show up is the same person who owns the business.

Participate

If there are community events that you can sponsor or participate in, be sure to do so and publicize it on your social media profiles. You can do this without being overly opportunistic. For example, if you had employees participating in a charity run, it would be easy enough to put out a Twitter notice about it and actually promote the event rather than directly promoting your business. Remember that your business logo will appear on the tweet, so you get the promotion, anyway.

Make sure your domain is integrated with your social networking site.WordPress templates oftentimes have these types of features built right into them, so it’s usually just a matter of selecting a few check-boxes and settings and preferences. Once you have this done, you can further integrate your social media so that people who visit your webpage will see that they can learn more about your business on social media, where they may discover some very positive things.

About author

Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a web studio that creates original WordPress themes, that can be used out of the box. She loves to share blogging and technology tips.