Using Social Media To Your Advantage As A Business Owner

Have you been wondering what you can do to promote your current business further? Maybe you’re exploring how to best bring awareness to your startup or how using social media to your advantage can benefit your long-term goals. 

I know you’re tired of hearing it, but honestly, social media is often the best option to promote and grow your business. 

Social media allows you to establish more visibility and draw more traffic to your business pages.

So whether you are a new business owner or already have one, social media can be a beneficial form of marketing, and here’s why!

For starters, social media is brand-focused, and it is a constantly growing network that allows you to impact a broader, international audience.

There are many social media platforms to choose from and use for your business. Some of these platforms include Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. 

To understand a few, Facebook is a social media networking website for posting photos and videos and creating business pages that can target a wide range of Facebook users all throughout the world.

Twitter is best used for sharing news, quick updates, and photos in short messages referred to as tweets. YouTube would be great for uploading and sharing videos online. 

Choosing the right social media platform to use for your business is a big decision.

By exploring your options and picking the best channel for your business, it is important to at least pick one before you continue launching your brand on a different platform.

Doing so, allows you to focus on launching your brand on one platform and get it up and running successfully first, as setting up multiple channels at the same time and managing it all on your own can make you feel overwhelmed when planning your posts and creating content for each. This can lessen your chances of success. 

Once you have started making content on one platform and all is going well, you can then find ways to reuse the same content in different ways to maximize your potential.  Don’t do more work than you have to! 

When it comes to repurposing content, sometimes a lot of work is involved. However, a complete overhaul is not always necessary.

You may save a ton of time and work by repurposing content to fully use social media to your advantage. 

By repurposing content, you may create your writing in a variety of ways. Text, audio, and video are the three basic types that you can do so.

Your finest pieces will have a far wider audience if you republish them after some time on other social media platforms. All of them drive attention back to your business. 

When choosing the right social media platform, consider these five factors:

1. Find Your Audience

You have to ensure that your audience is active on the platform of your choice and that they are well engaged with the niche your business is in. 

Facebook has over one billion followers worldwide and is a mega player in the social media world with good reason. Facebook allows you to promote your brand to a wider audience quickly.

When setting up a business account on Facebook, you can create a page in which you can include contact information, links to your products listed on the website, and multiple administrators that will manage the account for you.

Having said that,  Facebook is also a better choice if you’re looking to advertise your products through social media by engaging and communicating with your audience through your business page which is necessary if you’re looking to build a community and increase brand awareness.

Nonetheless, if your audience were more engaged using Twitter, then you should definitely consider using it first. All of these benefits mean nothing if this isn’t the platform your customers are using. 

2. Consider Your Business Type 

You have to consider if your business suits the social media platform you are promoting your business with.

For instance, if you’re a B2B enterprise, then LinkedIn would be the better option, however, if your business is more visual and you’re running a creative company, then you can benefit from other social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.

You can weigh your options and learn more about their unique benefits as you start to narrow down your platform. 

3. Understand The Different Social Media Platforms And Their Usage

Every social media platform is unique, and each provides its own method of communication. It’s important that you understand each platform in its entirety. 

For instance, while providing professional knowledge and corporate information on LinkedIn is beneficial, Twitter is fantastic for discussions and hot topics.

This social media platform makes it easy to send quick updates and quickly respond to others without having to worry too much about getting lost in excessive functionality. 

With the help of the social media mobile app Instagram, you can easily capture, edit, and distribute photographs and videos to a large audience.

This social media platform has its own built-in live streaming and the capability to run sponsored adverts. Instagram has three main options to post your content with the regular feed, reels, and stories that you can leverage in your business advertising.

Instagram also provides options for shorter video clips, known as Reels, which allow for features such as filters, subtitles, interactive backdrops, and stickers. 

Reels differ from Instagram Stories in several ways.

They last longer than 24 hours, in contrast to Stories. Furthermore, a Reel that you upload remains available on Instagram until it is deleted.

Instagram Stories are just as fleeting as Snapchat Stories, however, Snapchat was the first to feature disappearing posts.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a major participant in the social media industry with over one billion users globally, and for good reason.

Facebook is an excellent medium for promoting your existing or new business by exposing your name to a larger audience, in addition to being great for personal use.

You are free to publish business updates and other stuff that is related to businesses.

You can also post links to allow users to navigate outside of the platform or even to your company’s YouTube page. 

Using the video-sharing network YouTube, you may advertise your company online by posting and sharing videos you created. You can use YouTube to show off your brand in action.

You can work together with others to produce your own, carefully picked brand videos, or you can publish videos that seek feedback from your audience in order to build a more interactive network.

4. Learn What Is Safe To Post On Social Media And What Is Not

Now that you are familiar with your options on social media, let’s talk about what is appropriate to post and how frequently you should do it. 

The most important thing to remember is to avoid posting anything obscene on social media as you run the risk of offending your potential consumers and having the social media network provider remove your site or page from the Internet. Bad for publicity and bad for business. 

Do not include any private information about yourself or your employees, such as bank account details, addresses, or phone numbers.

5. Learn When To Post And How Often 

If you follow some of the most popular people online, they will tell you that you need to post every day and keep showing up. Honestly, we all know that is incredibly exhausting.

74% of consumers believe that 1-2 posts per day are ideal for companies, according to the Sprout Social IndexTM

Sometimes it’s too hard to post every day several times a day. If that’s the case for your business, spread out your posting from once daily to once or twice weekly. You want to avoid posting until you have something interesting or useful to say.

Something that adds value and provides your customers with something thought-provoking.

Your social media plan must consider how many posts you will post each week or month. This decision affects both your workload and your channel’s engagement. 

6. Align With Your Overall Social Media Marketing Objectives

Your decisions will also be influenced by the primary motivations for using social media.

Depending on the kind of content you provide, a handful of platforms will work for engaging with your followers and sharing content.

If providing excellent customer service is one of your top priorities, Twitter and Facebook should come before Instagram. However, if you value engaging and answering questions in your community, you may look to discussion groups, Reddit, or even Quora.

Bonus: On social media, hashtags are used to connect specific ideas to people who share the same interests.

This can result in a wider audience becoming aware of your brand, which is good for business, promoting you on a large scale to diverse audiences.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is that through an active social media platform, customers can exchange suggestions and recommendations with other customers.

You might even attract the interest of industry influencers, opening up the possibility of collaborating with them to promote your company.

Social media networking potential is limitless! 

By using social media to your advantage, you can leverage the actual marketing potential that social media has to offer in your business. All you have to do is get started now.