Expand Your Reach with Active Social Media Business Accounts

If you’ve established social media pages but aren’t doing anything with them, you’re wasting so many valuable opportunities to connect with your target audience. This includes your clients, and even your prospects who decide to seek out more information about you.

No Activity, No Connection

Social media allows you to connect with your target audience and build relationships with them. This isn’t directly tied to sales, which is why many small businesses won’t bother to post on their social media channels - some won’t even set up any at all.

But actually, social media is a powerful tool that can be utilized to educate and connect with your target audience. Unfortunately, unless you are paying to promote your posts, they won’t be seen if people aren’t following you. And, people aren’t going to follow you if you aren’t posting anything.

If you do post, and those posts are liked and/or commented on by someone, people connected to that person can see that activity in their own social media feed. Then, those people are made aware of your company and brand, giving you further reach (which is a fancy way of saying marketing visibility).

Without any posts on your page, you miss out on all of these potential connections.

So, What Should You Be Posting About?

On social media, you want to promote your products and services, but you must do so in a way that isn’t too overly sales-y. It’s okay to link back to your service pages, but try to make your posts' text more educational-based. And, not every post needs to link back to your website. Mix it up! Also, make sure to include images or a video with your posts so that they can’t be too easily overlooked in a follower’s feed.

You should also use this opportunity to showcase the inner workings of your office. Show off your employees by highlighting individual or group accomplishments, sharing a birthday or anniversary celebration on your feed, or even pictures from your holiday parties.

Maybe you do other special things around the office. For example, we have Puppy Tuesdays and Feline Fridays where employees can bring their dog or cat, respectively, into the office. Whenever a furry friend comes into the office, we will share a picture or video on JoomConnect’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts.

We also have Crock-Pot Thursdays, where we cook up a fun recipe for the entire office and share that recipe in a blog (that sometimes includes a fun video) through social media.

Obviously, our employee pets and the lunches we cook up every week don’t do anything to show off our capabilities or services to our clients and prospects as an MSP. But, they:

• Encourage more people to follow our accounts
• Show that we have priorities other than generating sales
• Help break up the monotony that can occur when posts seem too sales focused
• Build relationships with our followers
• Demonstrate that we care about our employees, and - by extension - our clients
• Generate positive word-of-mouth
• Can bring new followers to our pages

So, in addition to the educational content you post that should often link back to your website, we highly recommend including content that shows off your company culture.

How Often Should You Be Posting?

We always recommend posting about once per day on average on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you use a social media management system such as Hootsuite, you can schedule multiple posts at once in advance (we do one month at a time for each platform, and add additional posts as needed), making it so that you don’t have to login to each platform every day to craft a post.

You can post more frequently on occasion, and it makes sense to when you have something special going on: some internal office things to showcase, a live event you are hosting or attending, a special promotion you are holding, maybe even a contest you are running through social media. Whatever it is, you can feel free to post about it even if you’ve already posted on that platform for the day.

Monitor, and Engage

Even if you are scheduling a majority of your posts in advance, this doesn’t mean you should be hands-off with social media. You should be logging into and checking your channels at least once a day. When there, make sure that your posts don’t appear to have any issues.

Most importantly, you should engage with your clients and prospects when they engage with you. As mentioned before, the point of actively using social media is to have yet another excuse to engage with your target audience. So, reply and “like” comments, respond to private messages, and do what you can to make the social media experience feel more than just one-way communication blasts.

If you need assistance in getting content on your social media channels, we can help you get started! With Social Media as a Service, we will generate a post once per day for your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts - one that often links back to your company’s website. We even have add-ons to this service available that can help you share birthdays and anniversaries with your followers, as well as any other sort of custom post that you might want to share. Contact us today to learn more.