The utilization of social media on growing your business

Sometimes the best way to see if your business needs help with social media is to get your hands dirt with a social media evaluation. Although you might not be a social media expert…yet, you can still use these questions to see how to improve your presence.

1) See what social media channels your business is already on. Every business, even B2b, should have a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These are the most popular social networks and having a presence on these channels is necessary for your business ‘ s reputation. I would recommend having a Google+ account purely for SEO purposes but don ‘ t stress about posting content there consistently. There are a number of other social media networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. that could be beneficial for your business but only start if you can handle the upkeep!

2) Once you have all your presence accounted for, now it is time to evaluate how often your business is posting. Here at Likeable Local, we see that 5-6 posts a week on Facebook, 12 tweets a day and 5 LinkedIn posts a week is the ideal to be top of mind without being annoying. Posting too much? Easy, scale down and check out our 10 Commandments of Content to learn about the perfect content posting ratio. Not posting enough? Easy, check out our 10 Commandments of Content to learn about creating content.

3) Now that you have an idea on how often you should post, it is time to dive deep into the quality of your posts. Let ‘ s look at the text first! If you constantly find yourself going over the 140 character limit or three lines of text on Facebook, you need to start thinking less. Social media is for short attention spans and your blog can always house longer posts. Don ‘ t forget to spellcheck and use proper grammar! Nothing screams unprofessional like misspellings. Next check out how you are utilizing hashtags. Hashtags thrive on Twitter and Instagram but too much can be a bad thing. Play it safe by posting one or two at the end of the sentence that is relevant to your post. Your social media accounts shouldn ‘ t exist in a vacuum, are you posting engaging links? A great way to show how much of an expert you are in your field is to curate content from your favorite sources. Are you posting pictures? Are they high quality? Social media is a visually world where text posts and low res pictures get ignored. Even more visually appealing are videos, be sure to post relevant and fun ones! The final way to have the best quality posts is to include calls to action. Creating a social media community is important but you want to push that community to actively grow your business.

4) A great way to judge if your social media efforts are a success is through your engagement. Great content should result in likes, favs, shares, retweets, comment, replies and any other way that fans can show their love. If you are following all of the above advice, you are missing the final piece of social media, advertising. Social media is increasing pay-to-play so check out this blog post on how to get started. Once the engagement starts rolling in, it ‘ s time to nurture those conversations! Be sure to answer questions, thank great review and overall have fun with social. You active community will start turning into refer with your stellar social presence!

5) Once you have mastered social media to the point that sales are coming in, it ‘ s time to play around with your social ads budget. Keeping tabs of your monthly budget for social media compared to how much revenue social is bringing in is key to learning how well social media is working compared to your other marketing efforts. Knowing your results can help you create goals and what campaigns or strategies are working the best. Make sure you are tracking your conversions to truly understand your results!

There ‘ s always some way your business can be better on social media so take a step back every few months to look at the big picture. If your presence isn ‘ t on par, that ‘ s ok! Start off small by improving upon one aspect, tracking a new metric or creating a social initiative with the goal to create that return on investment.