Social media is one of the most effective ways to promote your business to reach its prospective customers and audience. As of 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide which is projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025. Furthermore, there are over 33 million active social media users as of January 2021 in Nigeria. WhatsApp is the most popular platform used in the country, with over 90 million users. Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram followed as the most used social media platforms in Nigeria.
The above statistics show that your customers are on social media and so is your competitors. Therefore if you are not using social media to leverage your business, you stand a chance of losing prospective customers to your competitors.
Great marketing on social media can bring tremendous success to your business, creating devoted brand awareness, as well as driving leads and sales.
In this blog post, I am going to show you how you can use social media to leverage your business.
What is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms to promote a company’s goods and services.
It involves the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand awareness, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This is done by creating and sharing great content on your social media platforms, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements
Social media marketing involves using your content to connect with your audience and helping them understand your brand and also how it can solve a problem.
How To Use Social media For Your Business
1. Define your goals and objectives
Before you start to use social media to promote your business, you need to have a specific goal and objective in mind. Using social media to market your goods and services without a plan might not give you the desired result you want.
Before you start social media marketing, you need to ask yourself the following question:
- What do you want to achieve through social media marketing?
- How would you achieve it?
- What category of people are you targeting?
- On what platform are they most active?
- What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?
Some basic social media goals include;
- Driving traffic to your website
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generate leads and sales
- Building conversions
- Boost community engagement.
The above goals and questions would not only inform your social media marketing plan but also give it a specific direction and get you your desired result.
2. Decide which platforms are right for you
After you have identified your goals and objectives, the next thing you need to do is to find out what social media platform is right for your business. The type of business you run should determine what platform is best for your business. For example, e-commerce businesses will perform more on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, also a Fashion company will perform more on Instagram and Pinterest.
You should also take note of the platforms where your audience are most active.
To make sure you’re using social media to promote your business effectively, you need to conduct some research of your own. This will help you to understand how your specific audience spends their time online.
You can do this by creating a customer avatar or persona.
3. Know your audience
After you have decided on what platform to use to market your product and services, you need to then define your audience.
The main reason why you have to define your audience is so that you can create content that resonates with them. .
The demographics of your target audience will help define the type of content you post, your brand voice, and also what days and times to publish.
Flowing from the above, even if your audience is low, you would get more results than when your followers are high and you create content that doesn’t meet their needs.
4. Create a Content Calendar
Scrambling to create posts at the last minute can lead to low-quality content and repeated posts on your social media platform. As part of your social media marketing strategy, you need to know what content, as well as the time you want to publish each content, and on what platform.
To get your content scheduled and well organized you need to create a social media calendar that would contain all your content, as well as the time and platform you want to post them on.
For example, you can use Google Calendar and CoSchedule for your content calendar.
Generally, a content calendar can help lead to more effective posts, create goals and strategies for meeting them and track your progress toward them.
5 Create Content
Content marketing is king, this is because every piece of content ranging from Images and text to blog posts and videos contribute immensely to a business online presence.
After you have defined your goals, identify your audience and decided what platform you are going to be posting on to promote your services, the next thing is to create content.
Content is another way you can use
Your content should be engaging, relevant, and informative and should also reflect your brand’s core values and add value.
You can post images of your product, videos of how to use your products, a webinar, or live video.
The content you can post on social media include:
- Written posts, blogs, articles, guides
- Links to external content
- Images of your products, office etc
- Videos
- Infographics
- Testimonials
- Announcements
High-quality content can enhance your online presence, increase brand awareness, and attract more sales. You can check out our complete social media content here.
6. Using Social Media Ads
Paid advertising is one of the easiest and fastest ways of driving traffic to your website and boosting your online presence. Social media advertising, or social media targeting, are advertisements served to users on social media platforms
Facebook ads are by far the most advanced advertising platform of all the social media platforms. It allows you to target by age, interest, gender, employment, and much more.
You can also Facebook Pixel on your website. Once you’ve done so, you can set up ads to target website visitors automatically.
The advantage of paid ads is that it brings your business right in front of a wider audience and potential customers.
For more on social media Ads, you can read more here
7. Make use of Influencers
One way to use social media to promote your business is to work with influencers. Influencers are influential people on social media with large followers. These are individuals who have a dedicated social following and are also viewed as experts within their niche.
Influencer marketing works because of the high amount of trust that social influencers have built up with their following,
You can research social media influencers in your country to find out about their terms and conditions. Making use of them to sell your product can bring a huge benefit to your business and your brand.
Getting in contact with an influencer in your particular industry can help you market your goods and services to a larger audience.
8.Contest and Giveaways
Hosting contests and giveaways on your social media platforms is a way of rewarding your followers and gaining new ones.
This can help you boost engagement and increase followers by requesting those that aren’t already following you to do so in order to participate in the contest.
These posts are also a great way for you to promote new products and services.
Be clear about your objectives and exactly how you want your audience to participate for the best outcome. Define easy, simple rules before you launch your contest.
Running a contest and doing a giveaway does not only help you engage your already existing audience, but it also gets you new ones who want to benefit from what you have to offer.