How to make social media work for your business

GoDaddy conducted a survey to study the effects of the global pandemic on entrepreneurs and small business owners in the MENA. We asked entrepreneurs a simple question: ‘How would you define your company's online presence?’. Surprisingly, 23% of them said that their online presence is having a social media presence.
Today, social media is one of the best ways to connect with people who already love your brand. It’s also important for reaching those who haven’t heard of your business yet. To help get you started, we have come up with 6 tips to help businesses launch their social media accounts successfully.

Demonstrating the value

Social media for businesses is not a trend, it is a new reality. Presence on one social media platform can exponentially expand your growth and open a new channel for customer engagement and potential reach. Let’s have a look at the six tips that will help you establish and develop your social media presence.

Plan and strategize
Create eye-catching content and visuals
Promote
Engage consistently
Drive people to your site
Keep a close eye on performance

Plan and strategize

Without a plan, you have no clear goal for what you’re trying to achieve and no way to measure your results. Take the time to create a social media plan right up front. This ensures that all your social efforts support specific business goals and will help you to focus your activity.

Set social media goals and objectives and create goals that follow the SMART framework.

Here are some strategic social media tips from our guide to creating a social media marketing plan:

Make sure your content is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Base your goals on metrics that will have a real impact on your business. For example, aim to acquire customers or raise your conversion rate, rather than simply racking up likes.
Research the competition. Ask yourself: how are your competitors using social media for their business? You may be tempted to copy them - instead, learn from them. Learning from what others have done is a great way to increase your learning curve. Competitive analysis can help you learn what’s working and what’s not for other businesses like yours.
Conduct a social media audit. If you’re already on social media, now’s the time to take a step back and evaluate your existing efforts. As part of your audit, re-check your KPIs and assess your insights.
Find inspiration. You’ve looked at what your competitors are doing online, but what about other businesses? Take inspiration from the success of businesses in all industries. Maybe one of their industry tips and tricks can be used for your social media work. Where can you find these success stories? Head to the business section of most social networks and you’ll find useful case studies. It’s also a great idea to ask existing followers what they want to see more of, then give them what they ask for.
Create a social media calendar. A social media calendar helps you post the right content to the right social channels at the right time. It should include a plan for your content mix. Try starting with the 80-20 rule. Use 80% of your content to inspire, educate or entertain your audience. Use the other 20% to promote your brand or sell your products.
Craft your messages. Patience and creativity are two crucial keys when crafting messages, so take your time to deliver well-planned messages that will showcase your brand well. Don’t post just for the sake of posting.

Quality over quantity.

Creating a routine of planning a week’s worth of posts. By doing so, it will help keep you on the right track of posting valuable content and take the stress out of trying to come up with a post just for the sake of posting. Some services like HubSpot or Hootsuite help you schedule your posts for the future, don’t hesitate to use them.
Now that we’ve gone through strategic planning, let’s have a look at another important aspect to keep in mind when thinking of content social media for businesses.

Create eye-catching content and visuals

The images shared on social can drive real-world action. More than half of millennials and Gen Z internet users said their most recent fashion buys were based on images they saw on social media. Think of it as visual merchandising.
Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat are visual-first networks. Keep in mind that your imagery on these platforms affects your content greatly. If your content doesn’t look good, people probably won't be interested. Even tweets benefit from a good graphic. Twitter itself stated that, “The single simplest thing you can do to get more attention to your Tweets is to add an image or GIF.”
You could also create professional ads, branded content and stories by using the Over App available on desktop and mobile. With it, you can avoid an enormous hassle of looking for content, avoid copyright issues and create what you envision for your social media promotions.

Promote

Another great means of endorsing your marketing strategy that efficiently utilizes social media for businesses is promotions. Make sure that when you promote your content - don’t over-do it.

Follow the 60/30/10 rule: Post 60% relevant; third-party industry information; 30% your own blogs to demonstrate your industry thought leadership; and 10% direct content offers.

Any more than 10% might drive your customers away as it can seem pushy.

Engage consistently

In social media, you must not only engage, but also engage consistently. The key to building meaningful relationships is to participate in the conversation. You can do so by reaching out to your community and responding to their comments. Only then can you set an adequate agenda.
Pick a platform with which to start. It can be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or another from the growing list of choices. Analyze channels before you decide so you can target accordingly. Each has its own unique characteristics and audience, and therefore your approach will need to be somewhat different in terms of how you can best present yourself.
For instance, LinkedIn is more popular in the business world and has a very large international follower’ base. Meanwhile, Instagram is more visually oriented. As for Twitter, it is very newsworthy, with quick comments and responses, and Facebook has many businesses, but the approach is more social. Each also has slightly different user demographics. Most importantly, find out which social media platform is the one your customers spend their time on because that’s where you need to be. Did you analyze? Have you found your target audience? Start engaging with them.
Engage with your customers and prospects. Show the people who reach out to you that you value their input by giving them a portion of your time and resources to respond to them, even if your message says no more than “Great idea, (first name)!”. If you manage to ride this wave, you possess a gem. Social media engagement is one of the easiest and best ways of our modern societies to leave a customer or prospect feeling positive about your brand.

Drive people to your site

This one’s a no-brainer. Your social media accounts should act as a preview of the main event: your website. Attract visitors to your site by providing thoughtful, quality content that speaks to your buyers’ pain points and will encourage them to click over to your website to seek out your products or services.
Check out some of the tools you can use to drive traffic towards your business by using SEO tools.

Keep a close eye on performance

Look at your current social media performance. Are you getting all you should be from it? Wondering which metrics to focus on?
Going through your key social media metrics can help you understand what is working versus what isn’t. This will help you plan and draft better a strategy and content for your platforms, and improve what you’ve already been doing.
There are dozens of metrics you can analyze and track their performance. Deciding which ones to focus on will depend in part on your goals and the platforms you’re using.
You can check the following help article to get better insights into social media performance/

Social media marketing can be intimidating for small businesses. With all the changes and new trends, it can be difficult to keep up.
Simply reach out to your audience in the places where they’re already spending time online. Focus on using one or two social channels, and then expand. Once you’ve got those mastered, you can build from what you’ve learned and expand your efforts. As we said earlier: It’s Simple.
For more social media resources check our blog.