Social media marketing can be a very cost-effective way of promoting your business, and its popularity can be seen in Facebook’s revenues of $2.5bn in the first quarter of 2014. So what approaches should you be taking when promoting your business on the two most popular mediums, Facebook and Twitter?
- Maintenance – Social media marketing takes time and effort. It’s not just a case of setting up an account and waiting for the ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ to arrive. This can prove difficult for small businesses to keep up with but is vitally important.
- Customer interaction – Facebook and Twitter, if used correctly, should project an image of how you wish your company to be seen. You should always look to respond to comments and posts in a positive and helpful manner. It is, of course, possible to delete negative posts but it is always better to respond politely to trolls – killing them with kindness!
- Good content – Social media accounts are only as good as the content that is published. People will not stay liking your Facebook page or following your Tweets if you just bombard them with sales pitches. Think about what people will be interested in hearing about and how you can interact with your audience. Competitions are usually well received for example and may result in people pointing others in your direction. This does not mean that you shouldn’t promote your business, but try and keep this below 30% of your content.
- Facebook promoted account – Once you have a good Facebook account up and running that has regularly updated content, it may be worth considering paid for promotion. For this, Facebook currently allows you to choose six pictures and a few sentences of text for your advert. This information will then appear as a sponsored event in either the desktop news feed, right column or mobile feed. The great thing about these ads is that you are only charged when your ad is served and it can be optimised for specific results, such as page likes. We currently have a Facebook campaign running where the costs are approximately five pence per page like and we have achieved around 4,000 additional page likes in six weeks. This account is also regularly updated with good content that people want to see!
- Boosted Facebook posts – These work by ensuring that your posts reach a greater and more specified audience that usual. For example, a £9 boost might be expected to reach an extra 1,000 – 5,000 people. As with the Facebook promoted account, you can set your boost to target people based on a number of factors such as geography, age and interests. Your boosted post will then appear on the news feeds of those who meet your criteria. Good post pictures are a great way of attracting attention, however it has to within Facebook’s guidelines, which includes a stipulation for it to contain no more than 20% text within it.
- Twitter promoted account – This is similar to the promoted Facebook account in that it is used for the objective of increasing your followers and expanding your audience. Your promoted account will be displayed in multiple areas such as home timelines, ‘who to follow’ and search results. We find this to be a reliable source of new followers but at a much bigger cost per follow than cost per like on Facebook.
- Promoted Tweets – As with Facebook boosts, promoted Tweets are used to reach a wider and more targeted audience than a normal Tweet. You can set a number of specifications in your targeted audience, such as language, geography, interests and people who follow another person. There is no minimum spend and you only pay when users follow your account, re-Tweet, reply or click on your promoted Tweet.
This post has hopefully given you an idea of what can be achieved with Facebook and Twitter, however it is by no means extensive.
Do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like any assistance with a social media campaign, whether it be the management of or simply some striking promotional pictures that you could use!