Everyone has their own personal social media account, but running an account for a business without a whole marketing team is a whole new kettle of fish.
Don’t worry – you’re not alone!
We’ve identified some features from some social media platforms which can help enhance your business’s social profile.
Like advertisements you may have seen before a YouTube video, brands can now run in-stream ads to align with tweeted videos, leading them to be seen by a much wider audience. Nielsen Brand Effect 406 states how those who saw the advertisements on Twitter were 50% more likely to be aware of the brand. Take a look at the graph below;
Source; Nielsen Brand Effect 406 Studies
And when you’re replying to a tweet you now do not need to tag the user, meaning that you’re free to use all 140 characters to offer some advice or help in response. This can benefit your business’ communication with its customers, and Twitter has found that “people engage more with conversations on Twitter”.
Finally, being able to pin a tweet to the top of your Twitter feed can also be great for a business: it doesn’t take any room from your bio area, and you can attach up to four images. You can have your best offer as one of the first pieces of information on your page. It can also act as an extension to your bio, giving you 140 more characters of freedom to make your followers and potential followers aware of what you do.
Instagram stories offers a live, ‘in the moment’ opportunity to post directly to your followers. With add-ons letting you swipe up to visit a web page as well as geo stickers and linking to pages it creates a new less formal opportunity for businesses to connect with their respective audience, whilst being able to keep track of those who have viewed the story as well.
Linking well with the story feature, Instagram’s new ‘shopping’ feature essentially allows a price tag for posts. Show a product, with an option to ‘shop now’ and it’ll take customers to the business’s website. Dave Gilboa, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker is already a fan of this feature, stating: “We love how seamlessly integrated and consumer-centric this new experience is”.
A new Instagram feature enables you to upload up to ten images and videos into one post, letting you get away with posting more content without spamming your followers’ timelines. This can also be useful if you have related images of a similar product or event which can now be grouped together – even better when you have a picture of a stunning new vehicle from every angle.
Spending money on an advertisement may seem like a risk so you’d want to see that your ad is doing what you set out for it to do. A great tool on Facebook allows you to view your ad’s relevance, basing its score on the feedback from your targeted audience on a simple 1-10 scale.
The live video feature is not exclusive to Facebook, but it’s still a prominent and useful feature. It alerts any user who ‘likes’ your page that you are live streaming. As well as this, having the ability to see viewers live reactions and thoughts through comments and the ‘reaction’ tool can help you to see immediately how your ideas are coming across.
With a great number of search features to narrow down who or what you are looking for on Facebook, more areas of your business are open to customers. Optimising this by keeping your page and its information up to date is key to ensure the best chance of being easily visible to those searching for you, or businesses like you.
The Slideshare feature presents a dynamic slide show of infographics, documents and presentations directly on your LinkedIn timeline. With the benefits of seeing your view count and tracking who downloads your slides. Embedding the show can also gain yourself more views as well as leads onto your site especially by optimising keywords and phrases for SEO on a site, to get people watching your great presentations.
LinkedIn retargeting lets you target exclusively to those who have been on your website, you can specify the pages you want to include in ‘Campaign Manager’. The campaign will be launched when it hits a minimum of 300 people and becomes verified, and will allow you to monitor those visiting your website.
YouTube
New YouTube features End Screen and Cards are much like annotations on videos, which take customers from watching your video straight onto your website or to a blog that you could be referencing. Although annotations did not work on mobile devices, End Screens and Cards do, and they are key in order to make viewers take action and not just move onto another video.
Embedding the YouTube video into your website to show an advertisement or to enhance blog posts is a good way to offer more valuable content for your visitors. It can also often increase the time spent on your page as well as being more entertaining for some than reading a blog post.
Using the Fan Finder feature you can make short ads for your channel that YouTube will put in front of people they believe your content will suit, at no cost to you! Keep it short and engaging as viewers can skip it after five seconds of watch time, but fill it with information to make sure it’ll stay relevant for a while to come.
Taking advantage of these features will help increase the social profile of your business, all of them completely accessible for everyone using the platforms, but not everyone is making effective use. If you found any of these useful or have any that we didn’t include, feel free to let us know!