Social Media: Growing Pains

Getting your impact felt online can sometimes feel like trying to get noticed at a beauty pageant. But fear not. You don’t need to slip into your best bikini and start droning on about world peace to get the attention your business or your product deserves (although it might help). You just need the right advice, a proper understanding of how digital marketing works and a fair bit of patience.

One of the most important tenets of any digital marketing campaign is, of course, social media. The important thing to remember with social media - if you’ll forgive the pretentious marketing-speak - is that it’s more a state of mind than an exact science. To truly get the most out of social media, you need to recalibrate the way you think about your business, from top to bottom.

First, you need to think about you and your business’ online “personality” and how the two merge. Customers gravitate towards companies with a distinct character and narrative. It is vital, of course, not to go overboard and be over familiar. But if something important is happening in the news, or trending online, your company should make its voice heard. You should also feel conformable tweeting and facebooking your own unique thoughts and sharing things with your followers that you find interesting or ties into your company’s ethos. The best companies online get this right and build up a large following of people who aren’t just interested in what the company has to offer, but also what the company has to say.

The second thing you need to think about utilizing is “visual media”. Photos and videos are the new 140-character message. Most people have very short attention spans when they’re browsing the Internet. If you can give people beautiful pictures to look at or videos to watch, they’ll likely spend more time getting to know what you’re about. Instagram and Pinterest are the two most useful platforms in this respect, although it is important to share lots of photos on Facebook and Twitter as well. As far as videos are concerned, it can be a lot of effort to maintain a Youtube channel with regular and, crucially, interesting content. Vine - a subsidiary of Twitter which allows you to record short looping videos - is a much more convenient tool.

Finally, you’ll need to dedicate a lot of time to the business side of things. How can you use social media to showcase your business? And how can you use it to direct people to your website? These are the sort of questions you’ll need to address once you feel comfortable with your online persona. If you go straight in with the hard-sell, you’ll only alienate potential customers. And speaking of potential customers, a lot of your time online should also be spent looking for like-minded people. Follow people on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram who you feel would appreciate your business; and share content from people who have similar tastes.