Social Media is a great marketing tool when done well and consistently. Social media platforms are household names, with in excess of a billion people worldwide on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The way businesses use social media is wide and varied, from helping to generate leads or to nurture sales, to making direct sales. Other businesses use social media just for brand awareness or to help with distribution of content, and many companies have customer service social media accounts in addition to their call centre numbers and online web forms for dealing with customer enquiries.

Get a social media strategy

The first thing to consider when choosing to get involved in social media is your strategy. If you are not clear how you will use social media, then you need to be.

Outlining a social media strategy will help you decide the tone of voice for your brand online, who will resource the channel and whether this is during UK office hours only or whether you will go for it 24/7.

A strategy will also help you to decide what you expect to get from these channels. It is too simplistic to expect that by merely posting once or twice a day will lead to a big upturn in sales for your company. If a lift in sales is what you are chasing then the strategy should help you to define exactly how you will achieve this.

So, when starting out in social media, the first place to visit is the drawing board. If you need help and guidance through putting together a social media strategy, then we can facilitate this for you.

Outsourced social media management

If you can resource your social media in-house, then our advice is that you do so. Not many companies are able to hit the ground running like this though and so this is where we can step in.

We handle social media management for many businesses across the UK in all sorts of sectors and we, quite literally, converse with tens of thousands of people a day in doing so. So you could say that we have form.

For many businesses, the only sensible route is to outsource social media management, which we are more than happy to handle. We seek out and engage with your audience in meaningful ways to ensure the new followers we do attract are looking for your business and aren’t just making up the numbers.

For other businesses, we adopt a tandem management/training route where we work alongside in-house personnel for a number of months before handing over the reins entirely. We find this a more effective way of ‘showing not telling’ to our clients than a one-off training course as the nuances of communications on social media channels can be so varied.

Talk to us about what kind of social media solution might be right for your business.

Social media integration

Publishing content on social media helps you to actively push your company on these channels, but you also need to look at your website and make sure you have integrated your social media within your website too. We are constantly surprised by how many businesses don’t link to their social media pages from their websites.

Integrating one or all of your social media feeds is also an active way of drawing in new followers on social media. Whether you just want to show your most recent tweets or integrate an entire blog into your site, you have lots of options. Using social media channels effectively can also save you time and money.

Instead of having a standard ‘latest news’ section in your website that you struggle to update, why not let us create a ‘news channel’ that shows a combination of your latest tweets, your Facebook posts, latest posts from your blog, video feeds from YouTube and and Instagram feed for example.

Search engine optimisation and social media

Though SEO focuses on site structure and content traditionally, it is also strongly influenced by link building from authoritative sources. Some social media channels can effectively contribute to the link building aim and is a valuable means of content discoverability for brands.

More subtly, social media can contribute to keyword strategising; it can also inform businesses on reaction to content or products to help businesses to shape relationships with their customers.

Get in touch with us and we can talk you through the options available to you.