From being completely unheard of 10 years ago, social media has become a major element to any marketing campaign. Yet many companies are still unsure about how to harness its power. But whether you are a newbie in Dubai’s start-up community, or an established business, there is one sure fire way to increase your profile online: integration.
Integrating all your social media is the only way to truly raise your profile across the social media landscape. Having only one account on one platform may seem the easiest way forward, but it doesn’t give the extra oomph you need to get more eyeballs to your website.
The first step to integrating social media is find out where your customers hang out. Whether you sell music, are an engineering firm, manufacture goods, buy and sell stocks and shares, or make bridal gowns, there is a social networking site for you.
On top of the niche areas you create profiles on the big networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Once these have been set up decide whether you are a visual company and if you are, add yourself to Pinterest and Instagram. And if the budget will allow get a YouTube account and starts posting videos of your product and services.
Once these are in place the next stage is where the increased profile really starts to work for you. Every time you have a new photo of a product, a new video on your services, you post it on all of the platforms. Some you’ll link back to your website – i.e a link to a blog post on your site, a link to the new product launch page, a link from Twitter to your YouTube account showing the latest video.
Working on a rough 60/20/20* rule, you’ll begin to grow followings on your social accounts and drive traffic to your website.
There are lots of tools out there to help you manage your social media integration, such as Hootsuite, that allow you to post on multiple platforms. So if you are running a competition, you can send the link out simultaneously on all the platforms you’re using.
It’s a simple way to increase your profile online, but you need to keep on top of it. Either employ someone internally or externally to manage it for your business to reap the benefits.
* The 60/20/20 rule is that 60% of your content is business orientated, 20% is credential orientated, and 20 human orientated. As an example, you can show your products, talk about your services for 60% of the time on social media, but you have to also devote time to showing your credentials. These can be commenting professionally on something that is going on in your industry (which builds people’s confidence in you and your business), linking to a blog post that also shows your credentials, or retweeting/sharing posts from people you think are talking about your industry. The last 20% is reserved for the human element. Some companies call this the funny side, where you show you have a sense of humour by retweeting/sharing funny pictures. But it doesn’t have to be funny, it can be whimsical, such as sharing cute pictures of animals (a picture of any kind is more likely to be retweeted!), it can be your fascination with the sports team, your interest in architecture, or even a shared interest you develop over time with some of your followers. The rules are very bendy on this, but the one no-no… is sharing content that might cause offence.