As a small business, where should you be investing your time and energy when it comes to social media marketing? This is a question, Keep it Real Social, a social media marketing agency, is often asked when we begin consulting with clients or teach a workshop.
The answer begins with knowing your target audience and knowing them well. Where do they hang out? To understand this, you’ll need to study your audience to determine what platform they’re most likely to use each day. You don’t have to be everywhere; you can focus on just one or two if you want to.
However, when using social media to get more traffic, there are four major social media platforms that you just can’t ignore. Look to these platforms first to find your audience before branching out to any new ones.
Probably one of the better known social media platforms, at least for adults. It’s free for anyone to create a personal profile, business pages, and groups. You’re in full control of who can see your profile, but it’s how you start with Facebook.
You can make groups open, closed, or private. Open means it’s closed public means that only people you approve can be part of the group plus see the conversations or secret, which means that no one can even see that the group exists without being personally invited.
There is also a marketplace where you can sell right on Facebook. This, along with Facebook events that allow you to publicize your events and pages where you can advertise, all work together to create a fantastic traffic generating machine. Considering that there are over one billion active Facebook users, you can’t go wrong.
Pinterest isn’t a social media platform but a search engine, and it is made for people who love pinboards, vision boards, and pictorially tracking things. The platform calls for images and video, so anything you can make more visual is a good candidate for marketing via Pinterest.
Valued at over 12 billion dollars, Pinterest has over 150 million active monthly users. Depending on your offering, your audience may love to hang out there looking at pins, clicking pins to go through to the original site, and even buying right off Pinterest.
Considering that 26 % of all US adults, mostly between the ages of 18 to 49, are using Pinterest at least monthly, you can likely find your audience here. The trick is to figure out how to make your offerings as visually appealing as possible since what people see without clicking is made up of images.
This visual social media platform is also a favorite of the youthful, with more than 59 percent being between the ages of 18 and 29. Further, most of them are female. A highly visual medium, Instagram is very popular with lifestyle brands and fashionistas.
To generate traffic from Instagram, you must understand the social media platform’s ins and outs. For Instagram users, it’s all in the bio and profile. You’ll need to put the right kind of link that sends them to a great landing page to convert them to your email list. Use awesome images, creative videos, hashtags (5 to 10 per post), and exclusive content.
Finally, be active and engaging as much as possible to become known as the go-to person in your niche on Instagram. Be engaging, share information freely, and focus on relationship building.
A platform built for professionals. It’s a much more buttoned-up version of Facebook in that most people use very professional looking profile pictures rather than the more artsy images used on other platforms. It’s a favorite platform for coaches, teachers, real estate professionals, recruiters, and salespeople.
With over 450 million active members, it’s more than likely your audience is there. To begin using LinkedIn to generate traffic, the best thing you can do is create a full profile using all their features. Start by connecting to your current network, joining groups, and regularly sharing valuable content and commenting on other posts.
These four social media platforms can’t be ignored as incredible traffic generating platforms. But don’t rush out and make profiles on all of them right away. Take the time to find out more about the social media platform and how it relates to your audience first. If you need help developing a strategy and implementing it, our social media marketing agency is certified experts.
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