7 Tips To Grow Your Business & Build A Brand With Social Media Marketing

I’m going to go over 7 ways for you to use social media marketing to grow your business and build a brand.

These tips will give you some strategy on using your social media accounts to reach more potential customers and create brand awareness so people will get to know, like and trust you.

1 – Why are you using the platform?

Are you creating a Facebook page because “everyone’s doing it”? That’s not a good reason.

You need to make sure you know if your target audience has a large enough presence on that platform before spending the time creating and setting up a profile.

If your target audience is male construction workers that use power tools and heavy equipment, they are not going to be on Pinterest. So it would be best if you invest your time on another platform.

The best way to find out if an audience exists is to check and see if any of your competitors or industry influencers have a presence on that platform. Are they getting followers and, more importantly, are those followers interacting with the content?

If you see other businesses, organizations, and websites posting content that is getting engagement, then it’s a good sign that you have an active audience on that platform and you can invest some time into building a presence.

2 – Consistent Branding

When setting up your social media accounts, you want to make sure you are using the same image for the profile picture on each platform. Consistency breeds familiarity.

If you are the face of your business, such as a professional service provider like a consultant or CPA, then a picture of yourself would be fine and make you more relatable to your prospects because people like to do business with people.

But if you are a corporate business and there isn’t a face for the business, then a logo would do just fine.

Also, you want to make sure you are using the same username, if possible, for each of your accounts.

If you take a look at this example, you can see that the profile images are the same and the name on each social media account has the same branding.

Doing this causes an immediate sense of familiarity with the person viewing your page, because they may have come across your brand on your website or another social media platform. That feeling of familiarity adds to the trust level which builds up each time they see your brand.

If you have any third party recognition, for instance, if you were featured on a popular TV show, podcast, live event, or website, then you can display those on your profile cover images as well. These add more weight to positioning you as an authority and expert compared to what you say about yourself.

3 – Implement cross-platform promotion

This is when you link from one platform to another. You are basically drawing people from one place and getting them to engage with your content somewhere else.

The main way of doing this is to have a link to your website and other social media platforms in the about section of your account profile. Someone may have come across your article from a search engine but will want to follow you on Twitter because that’s how they prefer to engage with content.

Another way is to simply post a link to content you created on the other platform. If you created a helpful video, you can tweet it out on Twitter, post a link on Facebook, or pin a post on Pinterest; all which link directly to your YouTube video.

It’s an easy strategy to get some people who follow you on one platform to follow you on another.

4 – Put social media buttons on your website

There are two types of buttons and it’s important to know the difference between the two.

First are the social share buttons. These are things like the tweet button, like button, etc.

These should go on your blog posts so someone can easily share your article on their account.

Second are the follow buttons. These are usually placed in the sidebar of the website and they allow a person to follow your business’s social media account without needing to visit your profile page first and clicking the follow button there.

If you have a WordPress website, there are plenty of social plugins that will add both of these to your website.

5 – Post shareable content

Put yourself in your followers’ shoes. They decided to follow your business for a reason.

What problems are they having? What helpful information can you give them that will make them better after reading your post? Beyond that, if you want them to share your posts, then you need to give them a reason to do so.

Psychologically, people share for a variety of reasons:

• They may have found something entertaining and what others to see it.
• They may have gotten some inspiration from your post and want to inspire others.

Whatever the reason, the thing that makes something shareable is if the social status of the person will be raised if they share it with others.

So try and think of posts that will make the person sharing it look good.

You can use tools like Google Trends to see if a particular topic is trending right now compared to the past. There’s also BuzzSumo, where you can input a topic and it will show you articles on that topic that are getting the most shares on social media.

6 – Spy on your competitors

Make a list of competitors and influencers in your industry and take a look at their social profiles.

Do they have a lot of followers? Do their posts get a lot of likes, shares, and other engagements?

What makes them different? Is it the headline, the topic, or the time of day when they’re posting?

Don’t copy them, but use this analysis as inspiration to think of ways you can incorporate some of the strategies into your plan.

7 – Be social

This is social media marketing, right? There’s no point in doing any of this if you are not going to be social and interact with people. No lurkers allowed 🙂

And when you interact, don’t be that guy or that gal always trying to get people to buy something or fill out an opt-in form…basically always pushing for a sale.

Show people that you are human, have a personality and can be relatable.

Again, people like to do business with people. So get them to know, like and trust you first before you start presenting them with offers and sales messages.

Ask your audience questions about things they may be struggling with or goals they want to achieve. Be helpful and provide value.

If someone asks a question and you give them a summary answer but link to your blog article which goes more in-depth, that article may have a call to action at the end but it’s okay because you provided the value first.

Which one of these will you implement? Spying on competitors? Posting more shareable content? Let me know in the comments below.