Watch Your Business Grow With Social Media Marketing

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Watch Your Business Grow With Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can make your head spin. As an entrepreneur, small business owner, or nonprofit director, you have enough work to do running and promoting your business. Now you feel pressure to learn how to use social media. It can seem overwhelming, but if you haven’t already employed social media optimization into your business marketing plan, listen up! It’s necessary in today’s world of constant information to catch your customer’s eye immediately, and social media is the way to do it. With the right strategy, it’s pretty easy, too! Here are five quick tips to becoming a social media marketing whiz. We promise they work.

Social Media Optimization Tips

  1. Post photos. An image is more eye-catching than a paragraph, and people will click on interesting, relevant images. If you supplement the image post with words, keep it short and catchy.
  2. Open business-specific accounts. Is your business fitness, design, or fashion-related? Start a Pinterest. Do you work with music? Post playlists on Spotify. There’s no need to operate every social media account under the sun, but get the most out of what’s offered based on your specific needs. Make sure to have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and from there, the sky’s the limit!
  3. Hashtag, hashtag, hashtag. Hashtags are the social media world’s sorting system. They’re defined by the pound (#) symbol, they’re linked, and someone who clicks the link can see every post that has been tagged with that hashtag, from most to least recent. For example, If you’re posting about your new record store, you might want to tag your post with #vinyl, #music, #recordstore, #localbusiness, your store name, and anything else you can come up with. The beauty of hashtags is that you can make them up, so if you’re doing a promotion, for example, 50% off used vinyl, hashtag #halfoffusedvinyl on every related post. Encourage your fans to use a hashtag you invent that’s specific to your business, to generate excitement about your product. Many businesses in the fashion industry are employing hashtags to much success. Hashtags now work on Facebook, too, so go to town!
  4. Link your accounts. This is a way to reduce the time that social media sucks out of your day. There are settings on most social media sites that will duplicate the same post in many places. If you take a photo with Instagram, you can set it to automatically tweet the photo and post it to Facebook. The hashtags will transfer.
  5. Point to and from your site. At the end of the day, the point of social media is to get more hits on your website, promote your product, and grow your business by increasing your fan base. So if you link to your social media pages on your website, and link to your website from your social media pages, that cross-pollination will serve you well.

Get Started

The only way to move forward with social media marketing is to get started. So start small, but start! Have you had success with optimizing your social media for business promotion? Any failures? Share your experiences by commenting below. Happy posting, pinning, and tweeting!

Guest blogger: Sara Collins is a writer for NerdWallet. She works to help entrepreneurs and small-business owners learn about subjects like how to find the highest CD rates.

photo credit: Matt Hamm via photopin cc

 

By Wanda Anglin

Wanda Anglin has a passion to help businesses and non-profits reach their goals by attracting more of the right website visitors. Her empathy and understanding for small business challenges comes from a background in project management, sales support, accounting, and business ownership. When not helping clients, Wanda is traveling, fixing her home, or tending to her 900 trees (really).

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