Are you looking for new opportunities to sharpen your brand and boost your company’s marketplace visibility? Is your strategy looking to broaden your appeal to new prospects and existing customers alike?
Social media marketing is essential to this effort. Here’s how you can harness some of the world’s most effective social media sites to improve your standing in the marketplace.
Get a Google Plus Profile
Google Plus is not often at the top of “most popular social media sites” lists, at least not for U.S. users. But it does have a variety of use cases for large and small brands alike.
The Google Plus profile for Miami-based business owner George Otte is instructive. It shows the platform’s promise: high-quality imagery ideal for aesthetically minded brands, crisp text that supports to-the-point updates, visually pleasing interface that guides users to new and existing posts, and community-oriented features that promote engagement and discussion.
Regularly Publish Original Content on LinkedIn
Think of your company’s LinkedIn page as a second blog to complement the “main” blog on your corporate website. Though it has a slew of additional features that make it worthwhile to use in its own right, your LinkedIn company page is first and foremost a venue to establish your marketplace credibility and burnish your leadership team’s credentials.
HubSpot has a good primer on LinkedIn publishing for beginners. To it, it’s important to add that any content you do publish on LinkedIn should be on-message, rather than esoteric, and work to further defined company goals. LinkedIn is not the place for idle musings or off-topic screeds.
Launch a Medium Page or Writer Account
“Before you [use] Medium for your business, you should understand what sets it apart from traditional blogs and media websites,” notes Chloe Mason Gray, of Kissmetrics. “[In other words], what makes it something that looks familiar but is actually truly new.”
Mason Gray’s guide is a good overview of Medium for small business owners. Supplement it with your own industry-specific survey of prolific Medium users. Whatever works for your closest competitors is likely to work for you as well.
Use Instagram Opportunistically
Instagram is among the most opportunistic social media platform. It’s driven by candid, in-the-moment photography. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to post new content in relatively short order.
While Instagram is a useful complement to any marketing campaign, it’s also a great way to humanize your brand. Some of the most effective corporate Instagram posts have little to do — at least, directly — with the posting entity’s products or business model. A sublime photo of a mountain range backlit by the setting sun or an up-close wildlife shot provide feel-good imagery to engage your audience.
Invite Your Friends & Customers to TweetChats
Like long-form LinkedIn posts, hashtag-driven TweetChats are effective thought leadership tools. Schedule TweetChats every week or two, each built around a single topic or series of topics related to your company or industry. While TweetChats shouldn’t be overtly editorial, they can definitely support your company’s messaging and subtly promote its products or solutions. For instance, each chat’s hashtag(s) should align with a message found elsewhere in your marketing apparatus.
Get to Know Influencers
Ultimately, social media is about connectivity. Use your social properties to forge new connections with prominent “influencers”. Work to harness their reach in support of your brand. Remember, influencers don’t have to be industry peers. Some of the best brand spokespeople have little apparent connection to the companies and products they support.
Are You Social?
You don’t have to be a particularly outgoing person to take full advantage of social media’s potential. You just have to be willing to learn from experience — and the experts who’ve come before you. With studious messaging, advance planning, and a receptiveness to new ideas, your efforts to engage on social media are likely to pay off.
