Lead generation, as they say, is one of the effective ways to increase your sales. Regardless if you want to sell products, gain more customers, or persuade prospective customers, they all have to know who you are and what your business does in the first place. Fortunately, these days, the hype in social media can be used to every businessman’s advantage. With social media, businessmen’s ability gets to improve in terms of marketing their brands to massive audience internationally. As a matter of fact, a certain research from EConsultancy shows that about 70 per cent of brands are already considering investing more time and capital in social media to reach more audience and build brand image. However, there are only a few social media agencies in Singapore offer social media courses for entrepreneurs to help them on how to take advantage of social media.
Four Basics When Building Your Brand on Social Media
However, the game in social media is not as easy as it seems. There are certain things you need to know to be able to play right and below are some of the basics that most social media courses in Singapore would tell you:
- Establish presence on social media websites that can support your brand image.
There is hardly a day that people do not check on social media and this is something you should want to take advantage of. However, while there are hundreds of social media websites out there, not all of them are worth investing your time and energy. Only some can support your brand image and the task to find them is yours.
To date, the few top most popular social media websites are Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, and Linked In with Facebook being considered as the best platform to promote brand awareness. Because Facebook is composed of very mixed user base, it can serve as probably the greatest platform to introduce your brand or business to prospective customers you will meet online. On the other hand, another great option to introduce your brand is Instagram. However, this platform majorly makes use of images so that means you have to prepare all your graphical materials. If your business is about clothing lines or other ready-to-wear products, Instagram is great for you. Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are also crowded in terms of members and they have their corresponding specialty user base wise. If your business focuses on professional or technologically versed customers, Google+ is a good platform for you while Pinterest is great to reach women if your business sells jewelry, clothing, or other girly stuff. LinkedIn is also a strong choice if you are promoting business-related content and you want to connect with other corporate influencers.
- Create sensible and shareable content.
It is not obviously given but the truth is the more useful your contents are, the stronger brand reputation you will establish. Sensible contents are what your prospective customers will want to share with their circles unlike simple and unnecessary contents that do not create an impact in their lifestyles.
- Take advantage of your influencers at an optimum.
Even if your contents are valuable and striking enough that is only a part of the equation and will not suffice if your brand is not too known. Great content strategy will still help you build your own audience but it takes time to see the result. With this, it is advisable to leverage your influencers to help you introduce your brand in a faster manner. You can do this by mentioning their names or their websites in your contents or you can just tag any influencers you have referenced when sharing content to your social media profiles or better yet, you can send emails to your influencers to let them know you have mentioned them as a reference in your work. The purpose of this is to indirectly tell them to help in sharing your contents with their circles or audiences via social networking websites. This is quite a difficult task but as long as you are consistently producing quality content, then eventually, your efforts will get noticed.
- Promote your contents using social campaigns. This can be through contests or other ways that can help you gain visibility and improve your leads and this will be best performed if you offer incentives to your audience as these will encourage them to participate. That way, more and more prospective customers will meet your brand without you showing an obvious intent.
Even if social media is unquestionably an extremely powerful platform to reach new people that can eventually become your customers, inappropriately using it will void your chances of experiencing its benefits. Thus, a sound social media strategy is as much essential.
