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How to use Social Media in a Business

First things first, we need to answer the big question:

Why do I need to use social media in my business?

Well, in this century, social media has taken over and now seems to be the most popular platform to reach your audience. People are checking their emails less and checking their direct messages more.

Social media is one of the best options to expand your audience. To get a reaction, you need to post relevant and clickable information. You will get a better response from your audience if you engage with them. By engaging, they are more likely to share your content which means you are reaching a wider audience. It is the best road to take to grow.

Now it is time to go into depth of how to use social media in a business. Nearly 80% of consumers would be more inclined to buy due to a brand’s presence on social media. Your social media reputation is the key to your success. Every comment, share, retweet and like will help your business become more apparent to your target audience.

Your best plan might be to get a monthly plan in place. You could use excel to map out what you are going to post each day.  Our advice is to create a template which will be the same each month. Each day is a different topic but is repeated each week. Remember to use new information on that topic in the next week so you don’t bore your audience. When you have planned your social media for the month then you can either remember to post each day or set it up on a tool which posts for you automatically, like Buffer.

The more interesting your posts are, the more likely your audience will interact with you. Not all your posts need to be about your work/company, it could be about your staff members or new exciting events that link back to you. As long as it is relevant to your brand, then to you then you can post whatever suits you.

For example:

• Company Anniversary
• Staff birthday
• New equipement
• New project
• Example of work
• Client testimonials

If you have an E-commerce site, you can use social media to promote your items. On Instagram, you can set up a business profile and post your products. A new feature is that you can put a tag on the image to show the price. If someone clicks on the tag, they will be automatically be directed to your website and to the product. If that is not a genius way to increase your sales, I don’t know what is.

Social media can also be used when planning an event. If there is an important event being arranged within your company and it’s either public or private, you can advertise it and invite people to attend. You can include details such as time and location, and you can also allow people to comment and post on your event page if created through Facebook. With other social media platforms you can advertise it on a post.

Hashtags are key to your profile. Check out our other article called “Making use of Weekday Hashtags” for support. You could also use hashtags that link to your company so you can be found by people who are interested in what you do or even existing companies. For example: at Hex we use hashtags such as #webdesign, #digitalmarketing and #wordpress. Take a look at our account for more hashtag inspiration @hex.creatives.

It is completely up to you to how frequent you post, however to be able to keep your audience interested, I would recommend to post everyday. It is also important to work out when is the best time to post. You need to pick a time where the most amount of people are active and interacting. If you post at a time which hardly any of your audience uses that social media platform, you will not get many responses. There are tools available to help you monitor your most active time slots. I’ve mentioned Buffer earlier in this article, by setting up your posts to be posted through Buffer they will be able to suggest times which you are most likely to get a big reaction from.

Thank you for reading this article and I hope it helps!