How to Grow Your Social Media Account for Business
Plan, create and learn to build relationships with your audience to help your business grow through your social media presence.
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Social media presence is an important part of business growth.
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Always start with a plan to make sure you know the goals you want to achieve.
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Creating different types of content will appeal to different audiences.
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Your followers aren’t just a number!
“Lai, anukan ni, Facebook mama ah. Cemana kan membali barang ani?”
Chances are, you’ve probably heard this conversation before — and it’s no surprise, considering the rise of local MSMEs in recent years. In fact, scroll through your own social media feeds and you’re bound to see any number of posts from online shops.
With Brunei’s social media penetration sitting at an average of 94% in January 2020, it’s safe to assume that a majority of the population has at least one social media account. That’s a fertile ground for a small business to grow by expanding on their social media presence, and here are five easy steps to start!
1. Begin with a plan
Creating a plan will help you to determine your short and long-term goals for your business. Do you want to increase your following? Get more engagement on your posts? Reach more of your target audience? All of those questions require different answers and having a plan will keep you on track.
Another thing to consider: check out other successful brands out there, as well as your competitors. You can learn what’s working for them and apply that to your business.
Also, this is when you should start creating a social media calendar. This will help you to decide which content should go where (if you’re creating different content types for different social channels), and get you to post consistently, which is important to keep eyes looking at your business.
2. Who are you speaking to?
Once you’ve settled on your goals, the next step is to figure out who your audience is. And it doesn’t matter if your business is already up and running with a social media presence; taking the extra step to plan and outline your audience will help you to figure out how your brand can stand out from the crowd.
Learning who your target audience is will help you figure out a number of things: which social media platform suits your business best, what your posting schedule looks like, as well as the types of content you should be publishing for your business.
3. What are you posting?
With how easy social media is to use, it can be tempting to try and just post whatever strikes you as interesting — or if you’re selling a product, you might find that you’re tempted to focus on just the entrepreneurship side of things.
But nowadays, social media is a great way to get your brand acquainted with your followers. Learning to diversify your content by educating, entertaining and selling will allow you to build relationships with your audience and help your brand to come across as warm and human, instead of just being a faceless business.
Another tip: when in doubt, creating compelling visual content will be a big factor in getting your audience to stop and look at your page, and share them as well!
4. Build relationships
Your follower count can be a factor in your business growth’s success — but if all you’re focusing on is the numbers, then you’re missing a huge part of being on social media in the first place.
While having a lot of followers can seem great at first glance, but it is infinitely better to have 100 followers that regularly engage with you than 10,000 that don’t.
Here’s a couple of easy ways to engage with your audience: find out the kind of information that your audience is looking for, and convert that into content! Reply to those who mention you or share your content, and go beyond a simple like by commenting to open a gateway to a conversation.
5. Analytics
Whenever someone mentions “analytics” in terms of social media, there’s always a sense of uncertainty, but it doesn’t have to be that way! As social media continues to gain users at a fast-paced rate, businesses need to understand how to work social media in a way that truly benefits them and their growth.
There are a number of social media analytics tools out there to help you learn what solutions you can apply to your social media accounts, using solid data. But you can always start by tracking how your posts on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are doing using their native analytics tools first.