It’s Never Too Late to Become More Social

As business-minded individuals, we understand how important a social media presence is, whether you’re managing a large or small brand. If a brand is hesitant to adopt social media as a means of marketing, or even at the next level, are hesitant to spend some advertising dollars – it’s not too late to start. There are many benefits of becoming a socially active business, it’s just about getting started:

• 74% of people who follow businesses on Twitter do so to get updates on future products. (Source: Twitter)

• 85% of customers expect businesses to be active on social media. (Source: Vocus) 47% of people who follow a business on Twitter are more likely to visit that company’s website. (Source: Twitter)

• 47% of people who follow a business on Twitter are more likely to visit that company’s website. (Source: Twitter)

Brands are expected to not only be present, but to be active and responsive on social media. Not having a social media presence can make a customer question the legitimacy of a business and in turn, possibly lose a potential customer looking for you on social media platforms. Clients turn to social media as their outlet to voice opinions, ask questions or (hopefully, less frequently) complain about an issue. Monitoring social media activity can be a time consuming task that often requires a social media management tool for effective visibility and responsiveness.

Hesitant to manage a social presence for all franchise locations?

Multi-unit franchises or large companies can create social media pages relatively easily and find many benefits in doing so, with the correct planning and management. Each of these locations may have a different audience with unique needs. Building more social media pages and distributing content to these pages can be intimidating, if you don’t have a strategy in place. Managing one or hundreds of social media pages with a social media management tool, like Manalto, can be done with little time and effort and help you to reach your customers, target locally to push the right content to the right audience and further analyze your results. Publishing, pulling analytics, utilizing images and scheduling posts is easily managed from one central dashboard, across an unlimited number of pages with a tool.

Allow each franchisee to set up their local Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages (if desired) and then import into a management solution to easily manage users, publish content, change profile and cover images and analyze the results. Head office can push approved content and guidelines to the individual locations per their social media strategy, that they can then utilize in their local marketing.

Adding in advertising to boost your social growth.

Now that you’ve created your social media presence and have built some content and momentum within your pages, the next step could be to allocate some advertising dollars to boost your content to the next level. Creating an advertising budget for social media, even for only $5-$10 per week, is something that all brands can adopt. Facebook advertising is designed to meet any brand’s budget and take that allotted amount to reach more potential customers. Facebook and other platforms offer advanced targeting to reach your audience and help get your content and messages to the right people for your business. For example, if you’re running a lunch special at only one of your restaurant locations, you can boost a post advertising this special for just that specific region to help drive traffic into your establishment.

If you are among the many brands who are hesitant to fully grasp social media as a low-cost marketing channel, hopefully you can now see where and how you will benefit from taking the plunge. It’s never too late to become more social, whether that’s by adopting social media all together, branching out with local pages, creating ad campaigns or trying new social media channels for your business. Take that next step to becoming more social, today!