Social Media for Small Business Beginners - Launching Your Social Media Presence
Social media is now an integral part of a brand’s online identity, but establishing a presence is not as simple as creating a Facebook page and expecting a community to form overnight.
In part one we discussed the four key questions to planning your presence; we now look at how you launch social media and build an engaged community around your brand.
When is the right time to launch?
There’s no set time for launching a social media presence. You should ensure you are adequately prepared for managing the platforms you’ve decided to implement. Ask yourself whether you have enough resources to manage the platforms and whether you have enough content to keep fans and followers engaged with your brand.
As social media is an important communication channel, one approach is to create an advertising campaign around the platforms, or use a pre-existing campaign to advertise links to the social networks. If you want to associate the launch with a campaign, ensure that there is content for the campaign available on the social media platforms you are promoting.
How do you advertise your launch?
Regardless of the way that you advertise your social media launch, it is important that there is an existing business website or other verified locations that the social platforms can link to. This reassures users that the social media platform is legitimately associated with the business.
If you have a bricks and mortar business – a store with a physical presence and address – you can leverage social media by promoting your product on business cards or posters in store. Some social media organisations provide stickers or other merchandise to businesses that use their services.
If your business only has a virtual presence, promoting your new social media platforms can be emphasised on your website through links or by including an advertisement on your next email newsletter.
How do you get Followers or Fans?
It may frustrate some business owners that they aren’t seeing rapid increases in their fan base straight after launching their platforms. This is not unusual – good things take time!
The most effective way of increasing your base is to find communities of your target demographic - your consumer base already exists online. There are discussion boards and forums for almost any topic or interest on the internet. Find prospering groups online and engage them with your brand. However a word of warning: advertising directly on a forum is typically considered spam and may negatively impact your brand.
To be truly successful in social media, you must be able to retain the fan base you have built. The final part of this blog series will discuss how to continually manage your social media presence.