Building Your Business Through Social Media

Let’s talk about building your business through social media. Now, as we all know, social media is changing the way that we communicate and market business, so we’re going to be talking today about how to utilise social media to grow your business and being in closer touch with your clients. We’re going to give you a few tips and hopefully, you’ll be able to take them as a plus.

Back to the Beginning

To understand social media, let’s rewind 15 years. Yes, you heard me right, 15 years. How quickly has that flown by? We’ve been there with social media for 15 years. Now, if we have a look at how social media started out, forums on the internet gained a lot of social traffic, a lot of traffic from real people where the content was being created all the time. It was a content-churning instrument, these online forums where people were able to put up posts about different things that were happening, but normally always very, very content-specific. There was never a forum where you could go to talk about life’s problems and chuck up a photo of what you had for lunch.

Are They Really Social?

Ultimately though when you think about it, social networks are not social networks, they’re anti-social networks. When you have a look at most businesses, most of the time what they have on their label is not what they are when it comes down to what they’re doing. When you look at good food labels on things and you get crap food and you use social media and social networks, yet they promote being by yourself and not socialising. It’s quite interesting, very, very silly really, but here we are, and everyone loves them.

Choose Wisely

You don’t want to be promoting something that doesn’t have a visual cue on LinkedIn. For instance, the latest and greatest in antivirus now seen to you on LinkedIn makes no sense. You’re seeing this product that doesn’t really have a face, it doesn’t make any sense, but if you operate a hair and makeup salon or you do something like that, very, very good. You operate a restaurant and you want to showcase how awesome your food is, then that’s a great spot to be able to put that sort of information in. Either way you look at it, building your business through social media has changed. Social media has changed the landscape of how you build your business. Social media for the better or worse has become an intricate part of your marketing stack. You have to be on social media. If you are not, your competitors will be and they will blow you out of the water. Here are these amazing stats, there are over 1.2 billion people on Facebook, and you have to be on there if you want to be where the people are, you need to be advertising where all the people are.

It Can Be Very Helpful For Your Business

Social media is a great tool when used properly. There are so many times we see it used poorly, you’re not engaging with customers and what the message is you’re putting through are not going to be shareable sociable messages. You want to make sure people, when they’re seeing this stuff, are engaged and interested to continue following your brand. You should make sure that you’ve got multiple feeds that are coming in and you’ve got multiple angles with the way that you’re doing it. Anyone technology will change, and this isn’t a new thing from a social media era onwards, this has been happening for years, for years, probably thousands of years.

I haven’t done the research, don’t hold me to that, but probably thousands of years. You had the business through social media Yellow Pages and it was the medium to be able to advertise in. They would charge $20,000 or more for a single-page ad in the Yellow Pages, and that’s a full page, a single page, I mean the whole page, but $20,000 and people were paying it. People did it because it brought in customers, and that is where people were looking. Now people are looking through multiple different streams. A great example of this would be if you’re a photographer and you want to put your brand out there, you might think, “Oh, I don’t know. How am I going to do that?” Yes, it’s a very visual thing, so Instagram is sensible, but other people that are on Instagram are going to be the type of people that are going to be engaging your services. If you’re a photographer, obviously you can do lots of different stuff. Let’s stay with people as the core objects that you’re taking photos of. You can take photos of families, weddings, portrait photos, business photos, all sorts of different things.