TAPPING INTO SOCIAL MEDIA TO IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS
Every day thousands of individuals, corporates and businesses immerse themselves into the World Wide Web. Through websites and social media pages, blog posts and other avenues the world is going digital and those that have learnt how to leverage on the online presence are taking advantage of the hundreds of opportunities the platform has created.
However as the digital space evolves, how to establish your online presence has also evolved into a strategic thought process that answers questions around what your online presence will be like, how to establish it and how best to derive maximum benefits from it.
For this to happen, you must understand that just being online is not enough, your online presence demands well-thought-of plans, consistency, and a strategy to guide it and keep it grounded in the overall corporate strategy.
How you establish your online presence is like how you dress; same way your outfit must suit your body, the brand you present online must truly and correctly represent your brand thus a “me too” or generic strategy is doomed to fail. Using tailor-made approaches to building your online persona allows you to humanize your brand according to its true traits thus creating a true representation and online extension of you or your business that your customers can relate to and interact with.
The above advantages are clear for many entrepreneurs; the challenge though is in crafting the correct formula to enable you establish successful interaction around your online presence. Thus like all things business, you must start with research to identify your current and potential customers, their pain areas, their unique demographics and what drives them and your competitor landscape, among other variables.
The data collected here allows you to create your audience persona(s) and make informed and better decisions around your uniqueness by knowing what kind of content to generate and how your audience will resonate with it, their expectations of you like responsiveness, etc. indeed all of these elements form critical components of your online persona, informing you of audience expectations and the experience you must provide to best serve your target audience.
Developing the audience persona
Normally, one company will serve customers fitting into different persona groups including age, gender, geography, consumption patterns, and marital status among others. This diversity thus requires your online presence to know who these unique customers are, where to find them, what kind of media they consume when they consume it etc. and answers here inform if you will blog, vlog, do videos, write, use pictures or use a combination of the above.
Further knowing your customers and building your persona around them helps you to know where your audience consumes their media from e.g., video on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram while professional services on LinkedIn.
Once you have established your online presence, next is to grow it using a 3C formula:
- Content
- Community
- Conversation
These 3C’s are interlinked in that:
- Content represents the material you put out for consumption by your target community
- The target community create a sense of belonging based on how relevant your information is to them
- Conversations represent the engagement within your community; the kind, quality, and frequency of interactions, and the value they generate
As you develop your 3C’s you must always start with the end in mind and fit your package to deliver that end goal in the best way possible. Further, your plan must also be informed by what the competition is doing, ongoing trends, and events while avoiding the danger of blankly plastering your brand name on popular but not necessarily related things happening online. For example, if you wish to increase sales you can plan around promotion and or a how-to message showcasing other easy and fun ways to use your products or services.
Besides generating good content, you must also understand:
- How different platforms are
- How best to leverage features
- The best times to post
- Conduct polls
- What media format to deploy
Many of us drop the ball here simply because we do not appreciate the complexity and intricacies of the platforms present and how best to navigate and reap from them. It is imperative you take your time to understand the different platforms e.g. Twitter and Facebook as they may require different strategies based on the different audience personas of your consumers on each platform.
As you do all this, you must remember your social media account is an extension of your office and thus it bears similar expectations of your other staff. Key among these is consistency as it allows you to build and meet expectations and a good way to remain consistent is by developing a content calendar that informs you on what content to put out and in what intervals.
So as a business with an online presence, don’t just exist, live and thrive by applying creativity, and excitement in your communication and engagement. Where possible run promos, partner, engage experts and influencers, use visuals and statistics, live stream, and always provide content that informs and or offers solutions to customer problems.
This space needs to be dynamic with eyes on the competition and emerging trends- and to succeed you must also have a reputation of being either accurate, first, informative, unique, or most trusted. The reliability of your content is crucial as it helps your audience make decisions and thus your channels must position themselves as such- the go-to channels for the kind of information you provide.
Should you wish to learn how best to integrate technology with your business, Contact Springboard Capital at 0700 944 444/WhatsApp Us through the button below or email us at info@springboardcapital.co.ke. Our team members are at hand to guide you with the financial resources to help you finance the process of acquiring and implementing the technology systems for your business.
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Article based on Rayhab Gachango’s BizSmart Webinar Presentation–Rayhab Gachango is an award-winning writer with more than 10 years of experience in content creation, community engagement and online brand management. She is also the Managing Editor at Potentash.
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