What is the best strategy for a new company to create brand awareness on social media?
I am launching my website at the end of the month and I am creating a plan for getting my name out there and generating business. I have created a newsletter, added follow links to my blog and I have created a weekly newsletter (1 short article) to generate traffic and new business. Any ideas or suggestions for making the best use of social media?
Hi Todd,
Hope this link will help you to know an additional brief detail about SMM http://seo-expertz.com/smm-social-media-marketing-in-chennai-india.html
It depends on what your business is. I tend to utilise Facebook and Linkdedin the most. You need to make sure that you are posting things of value. Also good to offer something for free in exchange for their name and email in order to build your list.
I have sent you a message with some further contacts.
The reach-ability of Social Media is generally gathered through references. These reference groups can also be acquired through networking. You can also use other social groups or Professional Groups to create an awareness.
Regarding Newsletter, if you induce the topic given by participants or something like social interaction or you can put a topic for debate.. generally people enjoy debating.. it could create traffic.
Have your site ready, engage people about their interests. Offer incentives from your site to spread the word, and always show your audience what your business is doing so they get a glimpse of who you are.
Social media is all about engagement. You need the right ratios of value, engagement, promotion, and hype.
FREE. Lovely word, adored by millions ...and guaranteed to gain attention. IF the attention garnered isn't your target audience, no worries; 99% of them won't grab whatever you offer, but your target audience will. Maybe not all, but in the high 80% or low 90% will. If your newsletter is to be an ongoing thing, the first copy free and downloadable will be a start. A product? A service? What have you as a solution to some folk's problems? That basic formula - find a need, fulfill it - is the key to most successes and if you have that, a teaser or proof of it offered free should garner enough traffic to get your snowball rolling downhill.
Wow! There are many great answers here.
I've got one small piece of advice:
When using social media (this goes for anyone, really) read, re-read, re-read again, and read once more. Check for typos, grammar, inconsistencies and make sure the messaging is correct for that specific channel.
What works on Facebook does not always work in the same way as on Twitter, or Google+ -- not just the length of text, but how your messages are written. Optimize your messages specifically for that channel and note the best times to publish on these channels.
Lastly, don't rule out using images (when appropriate) to show and demonstrate your message as it relates to your website.
Todd
A call to action can draw your reader in and engage them to some activity. Since this is a new website , perhaps you can ask the user to engage with a direct feedback on how you are doing? This will help you get research to quickly improve and provides them with a sense that they matter.
My advice to you as a start up is to forget about branding. Branding is not revenue. You need revenue coming in before you can worry about your brand. Concentrate on marketing, generating leads and converting those leads to customers. Branding comes later.
Knowing what your competitors are doing is key. Also make sure your website is user friendly and has content that is going to attract the right customers. All social media sites are good but make sure the information you are posting is valuable and will attract the right customers. Do your research! Make it count.
Make your newsletter or blog a consistent machine, meaning if it is a weekly newsletter, make sure you have good content out consistently every week.
Depends on your target market. LinkedIn is more B2B. Facebook & Pinterest is more B2C. Twitter and Google+ are great for building awareness and reaching the masses. It takes time to build a following. Figure on spending at least 90 minutes a day on social the first month. Plan to blog at least 3x a week.
Here are some videos that help explain how it all works together:
What is Inbound Marketing: http://youtu.be/5qoHtUVLhjc
What is Content Marketing: http://youtu.be/kJMzeepcIR8
Understanding the Social Media Networks: http://youtu.be/Hi8DUJoINk0
Giselle
AZ Social Media Wiz
What business vertical market are you in? Is it consulting, a product? direct or B to B?
Hi Don,
I am in career and life transition coaching. I provide coaching and consultation on career transitions, career change and development.
Todd
Write about you and or your company, and engage in discussions that directly or indirectly connect with the products/services of your company and web-site.
As much as possible leave a "read more" or other link to your web-site so people follow it and actually visit your site.
Once on your site, have a "call to action" link/button available offering something (free product or consultation e.g.) that would entice any visitor to sign up.
As with advertising and PR, consistency, i.e. a few posts per day over a long period of time will start showing results.
One post every now and then will be the proverbial drop on a hot plate, the impact disappearing in front of your eyes.
Last but not least, find one or more keywords that your target group is looking for on a regular basis, and try to choose the ones that are relatively unique to incorporate as often in your posts and pages for SEO purposes.
Put content that gives value to your followers and relevant to their lives. Not all content should talk about your brand alone but share topics and content people would really like to read and follow you for.
Your blog content should be focused on helping solve business problems or items of interest to your target market as a business coach. These blogs you can then share across all your social media platforms, once you have some followers. Social media platforms that are very useful are LinkedIn and Google+. Join LinkedIn groups where your potential customers hang out and post your blog articles in groups that are relevant. Check out the group rules for posting. Some groups are discussion based so you would need to pose a discussion question before posting the blog link. Social media brand awareness takes steady feeding but this can be acheived through management tools such as Hootsuite. https://hootsuite.com/ Good luck
Market segmentation, adopt your approach to the behavior of a segment. There are a variety of diverse audience in social media that are often fence sitters thus you need to build a rapport, emotional bond through useful and relevant post, content since traditional brand positioning are losing its juices. Be spontaneous in implementing your marketing communication and be expressive of your value proposition. Start at 'what makes your enterprise innovative' because that establishes your brand by making things better. Lastly project an end user experience. When you have conceptualized, structured and planned it join groups, communities and apply the best practices in so far as social media and branding is concerned. For further reference I have here in my personal blog some actual experience http://andrewslibradilla.blogspot.com/2014/08/to-get-in-touch-not-to-intrude.html
Best of luck!
Unfortunately most things posted on social these days aren't seen by many because of the way Facebook's algorithm displays your news feed. With Facebook and Twitter, you need to gather followers/likes in order to have someone to speak to. Highly targeted and Promoted ($) postings on Facebook, Promoted ($) tweets on Twitter to followers of accounts like yours and include CTA buttons in both (now available). When you have a new blog/newsletter, posting a few times a day is okay on Twitter, not on Facebook. Finally, ensure that you are using hashtags (#) that make sense.
Post ten times a day on social media. But don't post about you and your company ten times a day.
Instead post your company information once or twice daily.
The other times post about your industry. Use hastags that are industry specific.
You want to become the expert of your industry. Give two sentence tips and quick advice. Gas Pump Station advice.
If you have a WordPress website you can run some apps on the website that will post your blog posts to Twitter every couple of hours. I have blog posts from years ago attracting people now.
I hope this helps. Good luck with the new website. I'd love to review it if you would like any more help.
Use social media to make connections with others before you launch everything else. Having a few followers on twitter and a few Facebook page "likes" when you start distributing content makes things a lot easier.
In other words, use social media to integrate with the existing community before you launch. When you join a community and are immediately sharing/promoting your own links, it's more likely to be seen as spam at worst or a one-way communication at best.
Hi Walter,
What do you believe are some good ways to generate leads using social media? How do I turn those leads into customers?