Introduction to Social Media
A few years ago, social media was unheard of. Today, however, it is one of the easiest and fastest ways to stay connected. Almost one third of the world’s population has at least one social media account; which is why so many businesses are utilising it today as one of the cheapest and most cost effective methods of marketing.
Each year, the number of social users continues to grow and grow. Small businesses are finding it harder to compete with corporate giants that are utilising social media.
It takes time to learn how to use social media to leverage new customers. It takes even longer to maintain your profiles and keep fresh content in the pipeline for your following to read. The question that businesses not using social media have started to ask themselves in the past few years, however, is “Can I really afford not to?”
At Social Media and Print, we want to help you overcome this issue. With years of experience in social media we want to offer you a bespoke, social media strategy to help you tap into your online source of revenue. Whether you want us to fully manage your profiles or to take an advisory role to help you manage yours; we have flexible pricing options to help you make the most of social whatever level you are at, in your business journey.
Facebook
Facebook is by far one of the most popular social platforms of choice. It is a place where old friends, new friends and relatives go to connect with one another by sharing their thoughts, favourite videos and articles. Recently, Facebook has become a viable option for marketing with the addition of promoted posts, instant articles, even the option to open an online shop where once before marketing was a lot more difficult here.
Local businesses are able to utilise the marketing capabilities of Facebook by targeting their audience with precision, by posting articles that are interesting and shareable and creating groups to promote discussions and engagement with their brand.
For many it is the social weapon of choice. Many businesses have set up Facebook pages in the hope of reaching out to customers, but many struggle to achieve the engagement to achieve additional sales.
We employ many different tactics to help improve this level of engagement. Our expertise means we are able to set up pages, groups and shops to drive traffic in the direction of achieving sales.
How many people actively use twitter daily? The answer to this is actually around 305 million users.
Twitter is a social platform that allows you to follow celebrities, industry experts, friends, businesses and all other manner of people. Their tweets form a constant feed of information that is tailored to each user’s interests based on the people they follow.
A constant stream of information has its benefits and its drawbacks. It gives the users exactly what they want, when they want it; But for a marketer, how do you get noticed in such a huge newsfeed? The average lifespan of a tweet is actually estimated at only twenty minutes before it gets lost in all the other information. This means that if you’re only posting once a week, the chances are you are not getting noticed.
This then poses the question mentioned before. “How do I manage a social profile such as twitter and run a business?”
The trick is to know the peak times to post your tweets, what articles you need to share and how to schedule these tweets. This takes time and resources to manage which we are willing to help you with. With access to your account, we can optimise your twitter account to work exactly the way it should be working.
Pinterest
Pinterest is a social platform where people share images and content. It is used for browsing pleasure where people enjoy the interesting
and engaging content and this presents a brilliant opportunity to market your business if you have a product or visual based company.
Have a go for yourself to see the appeal that it offers:
Try searching for something that interests you. What you will find is a culmination of thousands of people’s ideas and innovations in relation to your search. Here is one of my boards for example:
https://uk.pinterest.com/JackRicketts1/custom-guitars/
I have an interest in custom guitars, I put this board together to showcase all the different ideas people have come up with. Now, what would happen if I wanted to sell my own custom guitars? I have accrued the interest, cultivated a following and now I am able to market to them. What’s even better is that unlike facebook and twitter, where tweets and posts have a relatively short lifespan before they lose their relevance, Pinterest has long term referral possibilities because it stays relevant.
We can help you to build this following. If you have a product or design service. Pinterest is the perfect platform for you to showcase your work, real life applications and happy customers. If you still can’t see why being on Pinterest is so important, also bear in mind that it is the biggest driver of web traffic other than Google. Pinterest has come so far in so little time. If you try it out, I’m sure you will see why.
It’s relevant, it’s beautiful, it’s brilliant.
Instagram is another visual content giant alongside Pinterest. You may wonder why these platforms actually work as a marketing tool? Visuals are key. They grab interest and showcase your product or service.
Instagram is a subsidiary of Facebook. Therefore, you are marketing to a much larger user base and in terms of advertising, you benefit from being able to precisely target your audience and appeal to your specific niche.
Instagram is becoming another of the strongest social revenue platforms and it is set to out-pace google in terms of ad sales by 2017. Therefore, if your target demographic is people under the age of 35 and your product or service depends on visuals, you really need to be considering a social strategy to implement on this platform.
You need to be posting every day, visually engaging content with a call to action or something to entice your audience. We can help you put together this strategy.
Blogging
To be able to enter the online market effectively, you need a website and you need content to form a blog. This content can come in the form of text, images, videos, podcasts but it needs to be regular and relevant.
By blogging 2-3 times a week, you are doing your online presence a massive favour. Google is constantly updating its algorithms for scanning websites to rank them in the search results. These algorithms are called “crawlers” and we will go into these a bit more below but unless you are blogging, it is very likely you won’t even make it into the google search results.
You are also putting your own ideas onto the web. This gives you something to promote on your social profiles and drive traffic to your website. It will help people to see you as the industry professional you are and help to build trust between client and supplier.
You have to look at your website with the perspective of the people who are likely to visit it. What value does your website present to them? 55% of website viewers spend less than 15 seconds on a website before they decide to look at something else. That’s 15 seconds to grab attention and present information to draw people’s interest and excite them about your brand, knowledge and expertise.
A blog is your means of doing just that. A blog is your offering of information to interest prospective clients. But what do you blog about? How much should you write and what key terms do you need to put into this blog to optimise results? With our experience of blogging we know what will optimise your web page for the best results, to keep your viewers interest and engage with your brand. We are able to monitor results from each of your blogs and relay this information back to you so you know exactly what works and what needs to be focused upon.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
As mentioned on the previous page, search engines are scrutinising web pages in a more thorough way than they ever have before. If your website is not providing current, relevant information, key terms and links to other reputable sources of content, then you are unlikely to be ranked highly in the search engines, if at all.
We cannot guarantee that you are the number one result when anyone searches for your industry (though that is our goal). I’m sure, however, you can imagine the enormous benefits of being ranked higher than your other competitors. 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine. 75% of users of search engines never search past the first page of results. Bearing that in mind, how many people, do you reckon, search any key term related to your business? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
We have helped businesses work their way up from not being ranked to getting onto the front page of the google results. This results in a business turning over a few hundred pounds a month to tens of thousands. The results are astounding.
We implement strategies such as concrete link building, driving traffic, sourcing great content and using key terms to help your business get results. A lot of it comes with good social profiles and a well maintained blog.
As a side note, if you are thinking of paying to promote your website through tools such as adsense, 70 – 80% of search engine users skip past the ads and look straight for organic content. How do you use a search engine? Does any of this sound familiar?
Free Website Review
Do you already have a website? Do you know if it is working for you? We are happy to deliver you a full report on what you are doing well with your website, and what needs to be focused on.
All we require is an email address and your web domain. If you send these to paul@socialmediaandprint.com with the subject of the email as “Website Review”. Just tell us a little bit about your business and what you do and we will get back to you within a week with a full report.
The report will include how your social platforms are being run, the layout and design of your website, functionality, SEO and many other aspects.
Consultation Services
You may feel comfortable running your own social media. Perhaps you feel all you need is pointing in the right direction.
If so, we offer consultation services, in which we share with you the trending topics in your industry that are worth talking about, the times and frequency of your posts and what your strategy needs to include.
We will be walking side by side with you along the way to make sure that you are still going to get the best results from your marketing campaign. It will take a lot of time out of your schedule to run your profiles but if you are happy to then we will provide you with the structure to build upon.
Other Useful Links
Marketing Your Business Using Social Media
