Beginner's tips on social media management

Social media is made for building awareness about yourself and the products or services you’re offering, with the goal of bringing awareness to your personal and professional brand! Social media marketing works by driving traffic to your website to increase visibility, gain a following and find a loyal clientele.

The most popular social networks for self-promotion are Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter, which most people are familiar with, but how can you optimize your content?

There are many reasons to take advantage of what social media marketing has to offer, and many ways to benefit from the process as there are an endless amount of opportunities at the tip of your fingers. If you’re curious about how to use social media to get your business off the ground, look no further:

Here are our business social media tips for beginners!

Why is social media important for a company?

Social media marketing is important for growing businesses that are looking to expand their network of interested clientele. Firstly, social media is the quickest way to get the word out about a product or service, and it only takes a few minutes to do just that. 

A tweet or a photo could go viral in a matter of seconds, and if the right strategies are employed, this could offer you some immediate and loyal business.

Before social media marketing existed, companies invested in billboards and other forms of advertising to reel in new clients. Today, people are spending countless hours glued to their phone or computer instead of driving on the open road. 

As a result, marketers have employed new strategies to utilize social media, which has become a trusted and excellent channel for reaching out to those who are just passing by your website. 

Pick your platform!

If you’re just starting out on social media, and not sure quite how to kick things off, it’s best to choose one or two social media channels. Concentrating on one or two social networks instead of trying your hand at every single option at once will allow you to find your niche within the market, and test out strategies that work for your business.

Signing up for too many platforms can affect your efficiency as well as your success. When signing up for platforms, take into consideration the number of followers you can obtain in the shortest amount of time. 

For example, if you have 1000 followers on Facebook and only 100 on Twitter, it is probably best to concentrate your efforts on your Facebook. As your company's impact grows on one network, you can move to other platforms. 

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Optimise your profiles

Once you have decided on which social media platforms suit your business best, you’ll have to figure out how to optimize them. Your profiles can be optimized by understanding how SEO works.  Here are some tips for optimizing your profiles:

Firstly, use an actual photo in place of photos of animals, places or anything that isn’t real or sincere. Since you want to have a trusted profile, it is best to have a picture that people can identify with and understand as the face of your brand. Choosing to use your brand logo is another option, but will depend on how what you want customer takeaway to be.

Be strategic, and choose a photo that will present a personable and approachable face for your business! Alongside the photo, you’ll want a great description that details the expertise you are offering. Lay bare the things that you’re proud of so that others will feel confident about what you’re offering! 

Make sure to include a link to your website, and use SEO tactics on your social media pages just as those you would employ in your website content. There are plenty of ways to boost your SEO use on your social media profiles, so do a bit of research to understand how to further expand your exposure. 

Connections!

After you have gained a following on the social media channels you’ve chosen, you should connect these with your website. This requires specific platform-dependent procedures and it is important to follow these correctly.

A correct binding of your website with your social media pages will involve search engines being able to identify which websites correspond to which social media pages. Do your research regarding how this works, looking into social media-specific strategies for Google and other search engines to recognize your business profiles.

Further, aside from connecting your website with the respective social media pages, you should add social media buttons so that these pages can be easily accessed from your website as well as allowing readers to share your content.

The plugin for your site will directly depend on the social media platform you are using as well as your blog or website’s host. Regardless of the platforms, bear in mind that larger buttons work better than smaller ones and keeping buttons above website folds will increase exposure. 

Find the influencers in your field

Now that you’ve gained some followers and connected your social media pages to your website, it’s time to learn and grow from influencers in your field. Gradually building your followers will directly depend on the people that you follow, and knowing the important connections.

Growing a following can be difficult at the start, but there are a few basic steps to take to make the process easier. As we stated, the first step is to follow the influencers in your niche or field. Normally, you won’t automatically gain a follower, as new accounts with little followers won’t be immediately recognizable to those more prominent ones.

However, this is a crucial step regarding social media platform algorithms, as this information will be used to make suggestions regarding who you should follow. Also, this will allow for your business to be regarded in the same niche as your influencers. 

Another trick to consider is to follow the followers of the influencer's account, as these people or businesses will be more likely to follow back as you have content in common. 

Lastly, influencer accounts will likely share valuable information regarding trends, offering you a chance to learn something new and grow alongside your followers. 

Balance is key

Keeping a steady balance between your followers and the people you are following is important. If your ratio is too high, you risk the chance of turning off new quality followers. Individuals place more and more trust in social media accounts, looking first at these profiles for answers to their questions about the business.

People will view an imbalanced profile as untrustworthy, seeing it as a desperate attempt to gain followers. A balanced profile is better overall for SEO, as stronger social media profiles keep businesses in a better position than those with weak profiles. A strong profile will have more followers than following and will also be followed by influencers in their niche.

When it comes to sharing content, it is important to post stuff that is interesting as well as useful, while keeping in line with your personal niche. Interesting content will depend on your business brand, but make sure to utilize hashtags alongside your content to make it searchable to potential followers!

Further, the number of times you post will also affect your reach but should be limited depending on the platform you are using. For Twitter and personal Facebook pages, the more you post the more exposure you gain. For business Facebook or Instagram, do not post more than twice a day. Make sure to practice restraint when using either.