time and quality of interaction between your company and your followers.
Improving business processes
Already, many clever businesses have found ways to use social media to improve business processes. Though individual applications depend on the nature of your business, consider leveraging social media to
Promptly detect and correct customer problems or complaints.
Obtain customer feedback and input on new product designs or changes.
Provide tech support to many people at one time; if one person has a question, chances are good that others do, too.
Improve service delivery, such as cafes that accept to-go orders on Twitter or Facebook, or food carts that notify customers where and when their carts will arrive.
Locate qualified new vendors, service providers, and employees by using professional networks such as LinkedIn.
Collect critical market intelligence on your industry and competitors by watching content on appropriate social media.
Use geolocation, tweets, and mobile search services to drive neighborhood traffic to brick-and-mortar stores during slow times and to acquire new customers.
Improving search engine rankings
Just as you optimize your website, you should optimize your social media outlets for search engine ranking. Now that search engines are cataloging Twitter and Facebook and other appearances on social media, you can gain additional front-page real estate for your company on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
Search engines recognize most appearances on social media as inbound links, which also improve where your site will appear in natural search results.
Optimization pays off in other ways: in results on real-time searches, which are now available on primary search engines; on external search engines that focus on blogs or other social media services; and on internal, site-specific search engines.
Selling in the social media marketplace
Conventional thinking several years ago suggested that social media was designed for long-term engagement — for marketing and branding rather than for sales. However, more and more social media channels now offer the opportunity for direct sales from their sites. In addition to selling on major social media channels such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram, you will also find selling opportunities on smaller, niche social media:
Sell music and event tickets. SoundCloud and ReverbNation, which cater to music and entertainment, are appropriate social media sites for these products.
Include a link to your online store on social-shopping services. Recommend products — particularly apparel, jewelry, beauty, and decor — as OpenSky does.
Offer promotional codes or special deals to followers. Offering codes or deals on particular networks encourages your followers to visit your site to make a purchase. You can also announce sales or events.
Place links to online or third-party stores such as Etsy (see Book 2, Chapter 1) on your profile pages on various services. Some social media channels offer widgets that visually showcase your products and link to your online store, PayPal, or the equivalent to conclude a transaction.
Include a sign-up option for your e-newsletter. It offers a bridge to sales.
The chart in Figure 1-8 shows the results of The Manifest’s 2019 Small Business Advertising survey that looked at how effective the different types of advertising were at helping small businesses meet their goals.
Adapted from The Manifest’s 2019 Small Business Advertising survey
FIGURE 1-8: Social media is what helps small businesses meet their goals the most.
Finding alternative advertising opportunities
Although time is money, the magic word is free. If you decide to approach social media as an alternative to paid advertising, construct your master social media campaign just as carefully as you would a paid one:
Create a plan that outlines target markets, ad offers, publishing venues, and schedules for different ad campaigns.
If necessary, conduct comparative testing of messages, graphics, and offers.
Monitor results and focus on the outlets that work best at driving qualified visits that lead to conversions.
Supplement your free advertising with search engine optimization, press releases, and other forms of free promotion.
As you see traffic and conversions building from your social media marketing campaigns, you may want to reduce existing paid advertising campaigns. Just don’t stop your paid advertising until you’re confident that you have an equally profitable stream of customers from social media. Of course, if your ad campaign isn’t working, there’s no point continuing it.
Understanding the Cons of Social Media
For all its upsides, social media has its downsides. As social media has gained in popularity, it has also become
