Due to lockdown among countries around the world, people are forced to stay home or work at home. Social media users are hooked either reading other user’s stories, sharing posts, watching movies and videos, or simply connecting with friends and love ones.
That’s the power of social media – to persuade, educate, entertain, and entice potential customers online. One of the essential roles of social media is connecting customers to the business in a social and personal level. But for some, it is an under-rated statement on how it is useful for businesses. Here, we answer most frequently asked questions about social media and how it helps grow your small business.
What is Social Media?
Let’s clearly define it first. According to Wikipedia, "social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks."
Simply, social media are digital platforms that make you create, share, and exchange ideas, interests, and contents quickly to the public over the internet.
What are the Types of Networks?
There are different types of social media you can explore according to your interests and needs. These include social networks, media networks, discussion networks, and review networks.
Social networks focus on connecting and exchanging thoughts, ideas, and content with other users – mainly with users who share tastes and interests like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Linked In is also a social network, as opposed to other networks, at a more professional level.
While social networks deal with connecting thoughts and raw ideas, media networks like YouTube and Instagram emphasize distributing and sharing content like photos and videos. A YouTube user or uploader, for example, will upload a video they've created, and other users can "like," "dislike," or comment on the video. If viewers enjoy watching the video, they may opt to subscribe to the uploader to get the latest feeds from the uploader.
Discussion networks like Reddit, on the other hand, are a good network a user can open a topic for exchanging in-depth discussions among users. Users may ask questions for discussions and other users leave comments, allowing discussions to grow and develop organically.
Meanwhile, review networks such as Yelp and TripAdvisor make online users review products and services. Users can interact directly with those leaving reviews, as can the business being reviewed.
Social Media Dominates: What Happens Online in 60 Seconds (2020)
Internet users prefer social media tools when online in 1 minute as seen in the previous infographics. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are leaders in connecting and interacting with different audiences, both businesses, and customers.
Thus, social media networks play an important role in disseminating information, news, entertainment, ideas, and thoughts to their users or subscribers.
How Social Media Works?
Social media cover a different kind of websites and applications, some features of these tools varies too. Signing up is different from one platform to another. But mostly it starts with creating your profile with your name and email address. Once a profile is created, you can easily post and share your content with the world. You can also create either a personal page or a business page to separate the two in posting content.
You can follow other users, add them as "friends", and subscribe to their channel or page, depending on the kind of social media. Platforms are using "feeds" to publish content for users to scroll over. Social media entities use algorithms based on your profile and interests to determine the contents shows in your "feeds."
How Social Media Management Important?
Social media is a short attention span media – you have to catch users' attention as they scroll down with multiple posts at a time. If your uploaded content didn’t look appealing within 5 seconds, users may leave your post and jump to another post interesting to them.
You must be active on social media. One of the shortfalls business faces is to open up a social media account they think is relevant and then leave them with no activity. Social media users may be turned off by businesses who open an account and don't engage with clients or customers regularly.
Focus on the Customers. Another big mistake business does is to use social media to focus on what is important to them instead of what is important to their customers. It is great to announce a sale on your platforms. It is sometimes true but that is not the only way to be engaged with clients in social media. Your goal should be to share content that is relevant to your customers and in some way connect with them that they want to share your posts with others.
In using social media, you have to engage with your customers, involve them in discussions, and asks them for their opinions. Engaging with clients consistently leads to knowing more about their preferences, tastes, and buying behaviors. Starting to posts relevant contents makes your customers feel connected with your business.
Images are important. The most-commonly shared contents in social media are images. It is recommended to add images on every post you share for your users and followers. This can naturally increase the possibility of your followers share your post in their network. While creating a big network is great, it is also better to measure how effective followers share your content. This is the new form of “word of mouth.”
Manage social media accounts regularly. Great social media management helps your accounts increase their exposure and presence online. If you were just starting online, determine what your goals are and what you want to achieve in putting up your business in social media. Formulating a social media plan or calendar guides you in engaging and connecting with customers. Highlight what marketing campaigns you are going to publish or post on social media.
With the help of a social media manager, they test each campaign against other campaigns to measure its success according to quality of content and engagements such as changes in likes, comments, shares, follows, inquiries and others. A social media manager is in charge of creating and maintaining your brand, company information, promotions, and marketing campaigns for your business. They monitor, moderate, and respond to users' comments, create and post sharable images and videos, and represent the company across different platforms.
In the advent of the current new normal, working remotely is essential to maintain your presence online. A virtual assistant expert in social media makes your social media management daily tasks easier and lighter. Get in touch with us to know more about how social media management.
For more business tips, check out our other blogs:
3 Easy Steps: How to Start your Home-Bases Business
Are your Virtual Team “Ghosting” You?