The World of Social Media

Social media, in today’s world, is an essential for all businesses to achieve marketing success. Whether you’re a large corporation, a small business, or a local mom-and-pop shop, social media is right for your business. It doesn’t matter the industry, nor the products and services your company sells or markets–social media is a powerful tool for connecting with your customers, clients, and prospects. Social media isn’t simply a one-and-done strategy, it takes consistent care and well-thought-out posts and consistent engagement with your audiences within your networks. If you’re new to social media, this could sound a bit confusing, so let’s talk about what social media actually is before we discuss the strategy behind it.

The actual definition of social media is “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” Long story short, social media is a digital platform for people to stay connected on, share thoughts and ideas with different forms of content, and interact with people of similar interests, or meet new people as well. It’s also a platform for businesses to do the same, and actually form a personable relationship with their customers and clients that goes beyond the traditional customer service that happens within your agency. The most common social networks (I’m sure you’ve heard of some of these already) that are used are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram, and they each have their own strengths. Honestly, my agency believes in a well-rounded and balanced attack when it comes to social media, so we touch each of these networks daily, and multiple times a day. Let’s discuss some of the strategy we have going in.

Unlike the myths you may have heard about, where a small or local business merely opens up a Facebook account and automatically triples their business, social media is a platform you can use to efficiently form long-lasting and personable relationships with your customers and clients, but it takes consistency and time. You can’t just simply open a social media account and then not nurture it, because your social media presence will die out in just a few days. In order to get consistent, you need to get yourself established, so first let’s talk about the types of content you can push out to your audience when it comes to social media.

There are many different ways that you can spread messages to your audience online through social media, because it offers a wide variety of content forms for you to make use of. The first form of content is written, such as quick tweets on Twitter, status updates on Facebook, and more, but we’ll talk about the different social networks available in a moment. Text updates of this nature are great for blasting out a quick update, especially on a personal network, but when it comes to using social media with business, these are fairly ineffective. At our agency, we almost never push out a post unless it has some form of visual content attached to it (with the exception of Twitter, where we will post more frequently than other networks and some of our updates will be straight text). Speaking of visual content, social media is a great place to spread your agency’s visual content marketing to get the traction and engagement you’re looking for online. Visual content can include posting videos, organic photos of your agency and staff, or photoshopped visuals that strongly and visually represent your agency’s brand (remember, a strong and consistent brand allows your marketing to go from great to phenomenal, because a brand allows your message to resonate with your audience instead of simply making a good first impression).

Like I mentioned earlier though, there are many different social media networks to choose from, and it’s up to you and your agency to find the right balance that will work for you. To make things simpler, let’s discuss each of the most commonly used social medias in business as well as their unique strengths. First and foremost, there’s Facebook, the largest network of daily users for years now. Facebook is a great platform for posting content of all forms, forming one-on-one connections with your customers and clients, and getting reviews or testimonials for your agency. Another network we use daily is Twitter, which is a bit faster paced, requires a few more posts per day, and has less “life” to each post (simply meaning that they will only appear in a news feed for moments, instead of potentially sticking around in one for hours like with Facebook). Twitter is great for posting visual content, quick updates for your agency throughout the day, and spreading URLs or links that lead to your agency’s website. Another network we use at our agency is Pinterest, the “buyer’s network” as some would like to call it. Pinterest is a great way to push out your visual content marketing, since it’s a 100% visually based network, but it’s also a known fact that users on Pinterest are more likely to make a purchase online than any users on any other social network. Next up, we have Instagram, which is very similar to Pinterest in nature, being also completely comprised of visual content. The difference here is that Instagram is also a great way of forming one-on-one connections with your clients, pushing out your agency’s brand, and reaching out to millennials, because this is one of their favorite places to hang out. The next social network I’d like to mention is LinkedIn, your one-stop solution to connecting with professionals in your space and your commercial clients. Although you may not be able to reach out to many of your clients who purchase policies for personal insurance on LinkedIn, this network is a great place for you to look for your commercial clients and connect with them, as well as push out your agency’s core messages and values as well through frequent posting. Lastly, I’d like to also mention Google+, which is probably the most underrated social network right now. Google+ is believed to be dead by some, but that is certainly not the case. Google+ has a very high user count since it is owned by Google, and it even has groups, or communities and circles, where you can connect with people of similar interests (for example, we sell classic car insurance at my agency, so I’ve connected myself with several classic car circles on Google+ to reach out to those people). Additionally, posting your agency’s content frequently here will play a role in your SEO (search engine optimization) since, as I mentioned earlier, Google owns this network and they decide who gets to have the highest search engine ranks in the world of SEO.

With all this being said about social media, where to begin? Well, I would suggest that if you’re new to the game, first check out Facebook and Twitter, and see if these networks will be a success for you and your agency. If you find good traction on Twitter, try posting a few times throughout the day to get more engagement. If you find good traction on Facebook, then you can try to extend your reach by boosting your posts, or “paying to play” by investing some of your marketing budget into your posts to reach a wider audience outside of your network. If you’ve already taken that initiative, try to expand to the other networks, track what is and isn’t working, and optimize whenever you can. Remember, social media’s primary strength is to nurture existing client relationships, so consistency and engagement with your networks is everything in the social world. Let’s get social everyone, and happy marketing on your journey to go digital!