Not Sure About Using Social Media for Your Business? You Need to Read This!

The 10 most important lessons to learn when running your social media campaign for your business

The 10 most important lessons to learn when running your social media campaign for your business

Here at Seven Creative, we’ve been using social media for business since social media went mainstream, so it’s part of the marketing mix we understand very well.

For virtually every business, having a good and consistent presence on social media is vital in terms of raising awareness, educating your audience, and generating leads – so it’s important to get it right!

We see many businesses doing it well. However, we also see many, many businesses doing it badly, or even worse, not doing it at all! Therefore, we thought we should put together a quick list of the main areas your business needs to focus on when planning and implementing your own social media campaign.

The 10 most important lessons to learn when running your social media campaign for your business

  1. Get to know your customers – you probably already feel like you know who your customers are but it’s still a very useful exercise to sit down with a pen and paper to really find out about them; create customer profiles, get to know them, find out what makes them tick. We’ve been setting up and managing social media campaigns for businesses for many years and I can’t stress enough how important the information you’ll discover during this exercise will be when it comes to creating the strategy and managing an effective ongoing social media campaign!
  2. Make effective use of your time – Let’s face it, nobody wants to waste time, and there is very little more demoralising than putting a lot of time into a project only to get no discernible return on that effort. Therefore, use what you found out about your customers during the profiling stages of your campaign to make sure you’re focusing your effort where it’s most likely to work.
  3. Measure your results – Find out what works best and do more of it. Find out works less well and do less of it. Now repeat. For example, ask your enquiries how they found you. Measure engagement and figure out what it was that increased it. Look at the stats. This is vital if you’re going to use your time effectively.
  4. Go to where your customers are – During the profiling stages you found out where your target audience is online – where they feel comfortable and ‘hang out’ – so go and meet them there. Get into those circles and make contact!
  5. Stop selling and start engaging – Nobody wants to be sold to! The adverts during the TV show are not why people are watching TV, they’re simply a tolerated inconvenience. People want to engage, be entertained, and to have their online experience enhanced. If you’re not doing that, you’re doing it wrong.
  6. Be responsive – Give people what they want, when they want it, and be there when they want to engage with you. Understanding your customer means you know why and when they’re online, where they are, and what they want. Cater for this and you’ll become an enjoyable part of their online experience. Don’t forget, however, this is a two-way street.
  7. Make a commitment – Get it in the calendar and stick to it. You need to commit to an hour a day for creating new content, timely replies to engagement, and maintaining a consistent presence. This needs to be a priority, even when you get busy at work. Having a social media presence is about creating conversations, not about advertising to people. Without this commitment, you’ll lose trust quickly.
  8. Remember your reputation – Focus on being available and providing excellent customer service, and your reputation will look after itself. It is, however, very easy to ruin your reputation if you’re not careful, and many of your customers will know this. Remember that you’re signing up to provide potentially public customer service, meaning you’ve got to do it very well!
  9. Don’t bother your friends and family – Creating an audience is tough, so for many businesses, the logical first step is to start by using your friends and family as your audience. But this is a bad idea. It is a sure-fire way to annoy people and be honest; are they even your target audience anyway? Instead, you should focus on creating an audience of your potential customers and leverage them to boost your audience further. If you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know it’s not easy. However, it is doable.
  10. Let the experts do it for you – Instead of letting social media get in the way of your main business activities, why not let the experts do it for you? With many years of experience we can set up and manage the whole ongoing campaign on your behalf, or even simply mentor you through doing it yourself.

Whatever you decide to do, call us on 0114 383 0711 today for more information on social media campaign planning, setup, and ongoing social media management.