It is today common knowledge that social media has become an indispensable part of the modern business strategy. You must, therefore, know how to make the most of your web presence and avoid common mistakes.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all useful and important, but you must remember that each one has a different purpose. While Twitter might be fabulous for real-time customer service, Facebook can be ideally used as a way to drive sales. Please know that actual likes, comments and shares on Facebook are less beneficial than using Facebook to drive customers to a company’s website.
Also, remember that while Facebook and Twitter can be informal and conversational, LinkedIn is intended to be a lot more professional.
If you want your customers’ attention, offer them content they will find useful. If you write something trivial and funny, you’ll no doubt get a lot of likes, but none of that is going to help moving products off the shelves.
Experts suggest that having a smaller number of active, engaged customers is preferable to trying to reach the millions of Facebook fans that you’ll never see offline.
If you have a local business, you can reach out to people in a 10-mile radius and not waste time and effort trying to rope in faraway clients.
To have a strong and efficient network, you have to offer value, you have to be helping people out inasmuch as you’re expecting them to help you. On LinkedIn, a common mistake is that people go on there just to extract maximum value from the network — to solicit and ask favors — without giving anything worthwhile back.
If you want to add someone to your network, explain to them how you can add value to them by cultivating that relationship. For Twitter, make sure that what you’re adding to the conversation is relevant and informative and that you’re giving people a valid reason to engage with your content.
The simple success formula is – be active and be purposeful. Frequency of posting depends on the platform you’re using. Posting once or twice a week on with interesting content — can be far better than posting four times a week and wasting your time and efforts to reach the same customer twice.
On LinkedIn, however, if you post alternate days in a month, you’ll reach 60 percent of your network. On Twitter, the right approach is to post three to five times a day on average. In short, have a practical goal in mind that you can accomplish through these networks.