As society increasingly takes their business online, appearance on any social platform matters for your brand. Social media is a tool that can be utilized to draw in a larger audience, shape your brand’s vision, and build a repertoire with other brands and content creators.
When you take the time and effort to make the most out of the opportunities that social media brings, you will be able to watch your business grow and expand as you dominate the competition.
Enhance Your Brand Exposure and Messaging
Social media allows you to control the vision for your brand. You can decide what color schemes to showcase and how you want to advertise your products and business. Social media also allows you to choose your target audiences by shaping the appearance of your business online.
For example, if you want to focus on the younger generations, go for trending aesthetic color patterns and use language that is popular on TikTok and other social media sites. Social media allows you to fit in with other businesses and grow with them as you see fit.
Entrepreneurs get to decide how consumers perceive their business. Pushing for a certain look that will bring a certain audience is a great way to thrive in the social media world.
Niche appearances and trending topics are typically successful ways to find a specific audience. From there, you can start to branch out in order to build up your following. Once you’ve begun to pave a path in the media world, you can focus on personalizing your brand and engaging with your audience.
Without social media, consumers are left to make their own assumptions and opinions, while deciding what kind of brand your business really is according to them. The whole point of a brand or business is the fact that it has been set apart from the competition in its own unique way.
In order to stand out, your brand needs an online presence. If consumers hear of your business and go to find your information online, it is essential that your social media sites are what appear first, along with your domain – not someone else’s blog or social profile discussing your brand.
Social media allows you to control the narrative. If you get one crazy review and that is all that shows up when someone searches your brand on Google, they are likely to take their business elsewhere.
Generate Sales and Commissions
Without spamming an audience online, you want to showcase your business and what it has to offer. Finding subtle ways to generate a growing flow of traffic will be the best route to take when looking to produce more sales for your brand.
Links are essential if you want to create a direct path for consumers from social sites to your brand’s site. Without it, some people will not put the effort forth in order to find your brand and shop from your business.
Put the link to a certain product or your main site URL everywhere you can think of, without forcing it onto consumers. Any social media bio you have is a great place to start, so that you can always refer to your business link being in your bio.
When you are pushing a certain product, it’s important to remember that people don’t want to buy from you just because of the product you have. They want to relate to you, and feel welcome on your page or channel.
As you create content, try to find angles that are relatable, inviting, and inclusive, so that your followers feel involved. When your followers can see you as a friend, they will trust your business and have no problem recommending any of your products to their friends.
If people aren’t quite ready to trust your word on your products, show them the efficiency of the products. Record videos of you trying or using your products to physically show why they should choose your brand.
Review them yourself, and allow consumers to see how passionate you are about your work. If you are in the right monetary space to do so, consider paying other content creators to review your products as well.
Have your followers pick out different products that they want to see you try. This is a great way to generate engagement because you will be showcasing products while also listening to your followers and interacting with their wants and opinions.
It will also give you insight on what products are more liked and what they don’t enjoy seeing on your channel. Sometimes all someone needs to see is a product in action in order for them to go straight through your link and make a purchase.
Promoting someone else’s product that goes hand-in-hand with your products or niche content is a great way to generate traffic to both of your businesses, making the transaction a win for both brands.
On Instagram, you can add tags to your photos that create a direct link to the product(s) you are posting about. This is a simple way to make things easy for your audience, so that they can go about purchasing the product without having to look it up on another site.
You'll Engage With Your Target Audience (Your Buyers)
When choosing where to spend your time and money, you will want the business and products to be worth it. Engaging with your audience creates a personalized relationship with customers, where they feel like they are giving money to a person who cares, rather than a cold business with no friendly faces.
There are many ways that social media can be utilized in order to engage with your target audience. Reply to comments. When you respond to comments from different people consistently, it will make your business appear friendly and welcoming.
Replying to every comment, even if you only say one word or send one emoji, will boost your reputation as a brand and content creator. Each time someone gets a response, they will be more likely to follow you if they weren’t already, and communication will bring loyalty from supporters who plan to stick around.
Listen to consumers’ ideas. Even if you work with a group of people, you may not always be seeing products from the perspective of someone who constantly uses them. If customers have advice or ideas for your business, it may be wise to stay open-minded.
New ideas could bring new business to your brand. Adding new perspectives to your business will help you improve things for your current audience, and widen the circle to a larger group of consumers.
Utilize hashtags. In order to bring your audience to your accounts and posts, you have to end up on the right algorithm. A lot of social media sites tailor their users’ homepages to fit the interests of that specific user.
Using hashtags that are solid keywords for the topics you are focusing on is a great way to push your content out into the world. Some users will follow certain hashtags, which raises your chance of showing up in their home feed.
People only want to view the content that interests them, so make sure your hashtags fit appropriately with your products and business. Don’t use random hashtags that are irrelevant to your business in a desperate attempt to get more eyes on your content.
Utilize algorithms. Although hashtags help, there are plenty of other things to do when trying to push your content towards the right direction. Descriptions are always helpful, especially when they provide detailed information on what the post is about.
For video content, captions will make it easier for the search engines to understand what your video content is about. Always make sure your title covers the exact thing you are posting about, so that viewers know what to look for.
Create images and graphics for your content. Curating your content so that it fits a certain aesthetic is important for engagement. People enjoy content that is pleasing, and it will always draw in new followers.
Take your time creating each post so that your hard work shows, and people know to take your business seriously. Become more than a brand, too. When you engage with your followers and other people on the Internet, you are able to personify your work.
With social media, your business becomes more than a title when people get to know the person who runs it. Without social media, you have to go with outdated methods of promoting your business that may not be successful anymore. Consumers are looking for easy access and comforting advertisements.
Set Yourself Up for Success with Competitors
Working with your competitors is the perfect way to build a larger audience from a specific niche. You may even be able to bounce ideas off of each other and build your brands together.
Promote a product together. If there is a specific product that you both want to focus on generating sales for, you can both map out some plans for different content to create. That way, you’ll both be promoting it at the same time, which will generate a surge of people going to check out this product, especially if you both have a solid following.
People love to see creators join together, and will likely trust two opinions over one. Or, promote each other’s brands. Even if you don’t promote each other’s brands at the same time, making a plan to promote each other will bring your audiences to each other’s channels.
If you both have a business that follows similar topics and targets a similar audience, you can only benefit from sharing an audience. Giving a shout-out to another brand will also make your business seem friendlier.
If you aim to only lift others up, then this is the route to go. Competition can be collaboration if all parties are willing. You can also create a product together. If you both sell a crafted product (example: digital art), get together with another artist and collaborate on a project together.
Combining both of your talents is a great way to generate revenue on a unique project. And if you film and photograph the creative process, you’ll have plenty of content to show your followers.
With social media, it has become much easier to work with other businesses and creators that live many miles away. You can communicate and create even through distance.
For example, you could run a small online business where you create wedding invitations through graphic art. You come across another business that creates cards from recycled materials.
Working together, you could create a unique item by combining your products. You can always promote each other’s products while promoting your own, too. Promoting other brands will help you build a relationship of trust with your followers, if the brands you are promoting are useful and dependable.
To bring things full circle and give your own product some of the spotlight, you can promote both products at once. For example, you could be an artist who paints on water bottles.
You could collaborate with a creator that crochets fun water bottles holders. When you create content to promote their brand, you can also showcase your own by showing how the two products look together, and how efficient they are.
Make content together to combine audiences, too. One of the best ways to grow your social media platform is to create content with other people. The world loves to see groups of happy people, who love what they do.
Meet up with people who share your passions, so that you can all work together to promote each other. Keeping an open mind and seeing competitors for how they can help you, rather than feeling threatened by them, will benefit you and your business.
With social media, you can bring your work to creators from all over the world, and work together to build up your businesses. Some people do it by demographics, such as women-owned businesses, and that might be an angle to take at times, too.
Enables You to Collaborate with Influencers
Social media has created what we call “influencers.” Anyone can become one, and anyone can make a career as an active influencer. To be one, you have to have a large platform with a lot of followers.
Your content has to be engaging, and your followers need to be loyal. These influencers can then make a living posting content to get views that from social sites paying them through a “creator fund.”
They also accept brand deals and will promote businesses throughout their posts, since they have a large audience that trusts their opinions. There are many ways that you can work with influencers in order to grow your business.
Send them your products for a haul video. Some creators in the fashion, beauty and other niches worlds will make realistic try-on hauls where they try on about 3-5 different pieces of clothing or accessories from a brand that sends them their products.
It allows viewers to see what the items look like on a real moving body, and help them determine whether they would be interested. If you can find creators that you know will enjoy your products, try to work out a deal with them.
The more they love your products, the more successful each post will be for your brand. You can have make-up hauls, toy hauls, prepper hauls – it works for just about any niche!
Send them a single product to review. If you are trying to stick to a budget and can’t send several products to influencers, simply work out a deal to send them one product for them to review.
This will probably lead to them doing a detailed review video of your product, which may greatly influence the amount of traffic that goes to your business site. This gives you the opportunity to pick a piece that you know will thrive with that specific creator’s audience.
It’s important to be cautious with who you work with. Some influencers take brands for granted and don’t always uphold their end of the deal. Try to research with a few other businesses to find out which influencers are the most reliable.
Pay them to promote your product or brand. If you can afford to, paying an influencer to promote your brand is a great way to gain exposure. You can make sure that there will only be honest remarks and reviews over your business, and you will be able to work on an official brand deal.
Influencers search for brands that are willing to pay them, because they usually aim to live solely off of brand deals and promoting other businesses. But newer influencers will do them for a free product.
Use influencer takeovers. An influencer takeover means that you allow a certain influencer to run your social media accounts for a few hours or a day. They will post content that promotes your business and discusses what your business is about, but through the lens of a popular influencer looking in.
Their loyal following will focus on your social media accounts the entire time, since it’s where their favorite content creator is posting. This is another way to drive traffic straight to your brand sites from a trustworthy source.
Although it may be more expensive than you anticipate, working with an influencer is a great way to drive new and unique viewers to your domain. Content creators can influence their following and push them to buy your products, which will help you build your brand and business.
