Making Social Media Work for You

You know that social media has become a powerful tool for business. When used well, it improves your reach and helps you to connect with and audience. Of course, plenty of individuals and companies don’t use social media well. They fall prey to a number of mistakes, or don’t align their campaigns with their audience or brand.

In the past, many were quick to dismiss social media. Those people and businesses are playing catch-up now. After all, how many people do you know that have no social media presence at all? Those who embrace social media as part of the current business environment have realized one very important thing — being social is an opportunity.

An opportunity for what? To connect with an audience. When done right, that audience will provide new customers. If you’re wondering how to make social media work for your business, this post is for you. 

Don’t walk into someone’s home

If someone walked into your home and started asking you to buy something, you’d be a little suspicious — probably even angry. The days of door to door salesmen are long gone, and most of us don’t like strangers invading our space. Unfortunately, that’s how many people treat their social media followers. 

They don’t provide any value, they just start trying to make a sale. Sure, they snag a customer or two, but that’s just luck. 

Don’t count on luck. 

Instead, rely on the only technique that truly works on social media — quality engagement. 

Have a conversation

At the most basic level, engagement on social media is a conversation. People interacting, sharing ideas, laughing at jokes and even arguing.

Guess what else is a conversation? Selling.

The best way to make sales is through conversation, and since social media interaction is also conversation, the two can go together like peanut butter and jelly. 

You know what I’m talking about — we’ve all experienced it at one point in our life or another. The right conversation makes sales a fun, enjoyable experience. The wrong conversation makes the whole thing feel like pulling teeth. 

Unfortunately, you’ll find a lot of bad conversation out in the world of social media. Between people using these platforms like giant neon billboards, crude and cruel individuals who love trolling others and just the sheer volume of content, many people find it difficult to have a meaningful conversation.

Need help initiating better conversations? Let Automate Your Social help. Fill out our contact form to schedule a free call and demo so we can show you how we’ll help you succeed at social media.

Think quality, not quantity

One of the best ways to start having better conversations — or engagement — on social media, is to focus on quality instead of quantity. Lots of people fall prey to the allure of having a ton of followers. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with having a lot of followers, so long as they actually want to engage with you. If they click “follow” or “subscribe” and that’s the last you see or hear of them, then what’s the point? They don’t read what you post, they don’t click your links and they don’t engage in anything you have to say. 

It’s nice to have a lot of followers, but it’s more important to have followers that care. 

Look at it this way — would you rather have 10,000 followers who don’t pay attention to you, or 100 who hang on your every word? That 10,000 may look great on your profile, but those 100 followers are the ones who will interact with you. They’ll comment on your posts. They’ll click on your links, read the content and share it with their friends. 

Those 100 followers are the ones who will most likely become your customers. 

The challenge of consistency

Another common mistake lies with how people post. They do so sporadically, almost haphazardly. Worse yet, they only post when they offer a discount or need to meet sales goals. That’s not good conversation. 

Think about the really good conversations that you’ve had. They’re long and ongoing. They branch out in different ways, circle around to different stories and then make their way back again. You reference them when you meet up with the people you shared them with. 

That’s how your social media should work too. 

That means that you can’t just post randomly when you have a sale or the spirit moves you. To get successful engagement with your audience, you’ll need to use social media consistently. That means that you need to publish your own posts in a routine manner, as well as engaging with your followers. That means commenting, liking, sharing, responding to comments — it means having an ongoing conversation.

Don’t fake it

There’s a whole shady industry of buying “likes” and followers, but you don’t want to go that route. Why?

First things first, it violates every platform’s terms of service. People can and do get caught — and banned — from social media networks for this. Getting kicked off of a network isn’t a good look for your business. 

More importantly, it’s unethical. Though it might not be fraud in the legal sense, it’s certainly dishonest with your audience and potential customers. Why should anyone trust your product or service, if you’re less than honest with them?

Lastly, it’s ineffective. Trying to pay for followers or “hack the algorithm” on social media networks won’t bring you any long term success. Sure, you might look good for a day or two, but none of those fake likes or follows will engage with your content or consider buying what you offer. 

Remember, quality beats quantity on social media — it’s better to have 100 loyal customers than 10,000 people who don’t care about you or your business. 

Automate the conversation

Here’s the thing, you can’t fake the conversation. It doesn’t work. What you can do is plan and prepare what you’d like to say. 

That’s exactly what we do at Automate Your Social. We believe in authentic, genuine engagement. We just make it a little easier. By helping you develop a social media publication schedule, creating killer content and automating the posting, we simplify the whole process. 

All of this paves the way for legitimate, long term, successful engagement with your followers and potential customers.

Want to know more? Fill out our contact form to schedule a free call and demo. We want to show you exactly what we can do for you and your business. Let us make social media work for you. Schedule your free call today!