Do you think that you don’t have enough followers on Facebook or LinkedIn to pay much attention to your social media posting? That’s like thinking you don’t have enough customers coming into your tech business to bother with marketing.
Social media has become a key part of any company’s marketing strategy and its especially helpful for small businesses by allowing them to reach more customers where they’re hanging out online. Over 3 billion people around the world use social media and more of them follow businesses there than celebrities.
77% of consumers are more likely to buy from businesses they follow on social media.
Just as maximizing your blog content can set you up for successful content marketing long after your blog is up, the same can be done for your social media posts to gain more followers and customers for your computer service business.
9 Creative Ways to Add Social Media Followers by Making the Most of Your Posts
When it comes to any type of advertising, you want to go where your potential customers are, and statistics show that they’re hanging out on social media. 73% of U.S. adults use YouTube and 68% use Facebook.
Approximately three-quarters of Facebook users visit the site every day, and over half visit several times a day.
So, if you think social media is just a place for your current customers to get news updates from your business, you’re missing the point. Social media allows you the opportunity to build your business by gaining new followers (leads & customers) by increasing visibility for your IT business.
Here’s how you can use your social media posts to make that happen.
Sharing Posts in Groups
Facebook and LinkedIn groups give people with similar interests a place to hang out and learn more about a certain topic and share ideas and insights. A group might be focused on Star Wars fans or how to build your tech business, like our Computer Business Marketing FB group. Join groups that you feel would be a good match for the types of helpful information you’re providing on your blog and share pertinent posts there. Sharing your social media posts on Facebook and LinkedIn groups offers you a way to gain new followers.
These social media posts are written to be informative about the subject of the blog, rather than “salesy,” which makes them easier to share without being considered spam.
Boost Your Posts to Lookalike Audiences
The newest form of social media advertising is called “boosting your post.” Both Facebook and its sister site Instagram allow you to target audiences that look just like your key customer personas in order to gain more visibility.
What boosting a post means is that you’re paying to have your social media posts shown to more people – those who aren’t your followers. You can control how much you spend to get your post more exposure and can spend as little at $1 a day.
How many people can you reach? It’s going to vary by your target audience, but Hootsuite notes that if you’re targeting U.S. users over age 18, then just $2 can get your post in front of anywhere between 163 and 872 people. That’s a pretty good reach for the money.
The return on investment for social media advertising is attractive for many small businesses that don’t have a ton of money to pour into marketing. Here’s a comparison from SOCi on the cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) for various marketing methods:
- Facebook advertising: $11.20 CPM (best value)
- Magazine advertisements: $16.00 CPM
- Broadcast TV: $28.00 CPM
- Direct mail: $57.00 CPM
Use Posts as a Base for Your Own LinkedIn Group
As a tech business owner, you have knowledge that other people benefit from. Especially in today’s technology driven world. TBB blog posts are designed to provide both informative and trending information designed to get your posts seen. A few recent topics include:
- Wi-Fi 6 and it’s increased security and speed
- How a business can prepare for the EOL for Windows 7
- Steps for creating a solid disaster recovery plan
- Tips to becoming a Windows 10 “super user”
If your business works with commercial clients, then having a LinkedIn presence and creating a technology/business based LinkedIn group that’s based upon your social media content can help you both be seen as a trusted authority in the IT industry, and give you a way to connect with and gain more B2B clients.
More than half of LinkedIn members belong to at least one LinkedIn group.
Explore Other Social Media Outlets
Some platforms that you may have dismissed as not important to your business, might actually be fertile ground for finding new customers. For example, 60% of Instagram users say they discover new products through the platform.
While YouTube and Facebook do have the largest number of users globally, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also explore posting on other mediums. If you thought it’s a waste of time to use outlets like Instagram or SnapChat, you may be surprised to learn we had a recent post on our CBM Facebook Group from an IT business owner that said Instagram brought them “loads of work.”
Explore social media outlets that you may have been ignoring. You already have the posts, why not use them?!
One way that you can save time posting to multiple social media networks is to use a tool that lets you send out your posts (and pre-schedule them) to several networks at once.
Some of these social media posting tools you can use are:
Create a Sharable Graphic
You can encourage more sharing of your content, which helps you reach a wider audience by attaching a sharable graphic to your post. Visuals are of key importance when it comes to social media posting, and statistics back this up.
Here are a few Hubspot stats about the importance of social media visuals:
- Tweets with images are retweeted 150% more than those without
- Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement
- Snapchat users share 9,000 images per second
As an example of how you can parlay that social media post into a sharable image, here is one we created below based upon a Tech Blog Builder social media post created for an IT business client recently.
Just add your website to the bottom, and you’ve got a sharable calling card that can have a lifetime over multiple months or years.
Create Sharable Tweets for Your Website
A sharable tweet is a snippet of text that you prepopulate and that website visitors can easily click a button to tweet out to their followers. Adding these to your website encourages visitors to share helpful information that includes your twitter @handle and also popular #hashtag if you choose.
For example, using the above social media post you could make a sharable tweet that says:
81% of data breaches are due to weak or stolen passwords. How secure is yours? (link to your blog about password security) [source @yourbusiness]
Beneath the text snippet there would be a text link or button that says something like “click to tweet”.
Adding these throughout your site helps you further benefit from those social media posts and can gain you more website traffic and social media followers.
How do you make a tweetable link? Hubspot has a great step-by-step guide here.
Use Your Most Powerful Social Media Posts in an Infographic
If you have some great statistics, quotes, or messages from your past social media posts that focus on a similar topic, such as cybersecurity, you can gather those together into an infographic on the subject to get even more traction from them.
People like the quick bites of information combined with an engaging visual background that infographics provide. Studies show that infographics can increase website traffic by up to 12%, so they can be another powerful tool in your content creation toolbelt that can bring in more leads and customers.
Putting these together is made even easier by free online infographic making tools like Canva and Venngage that let you edit templates to add your text and visuals. Don’t forget to include your website and logo on any infographics you make, it’s great advertising when others use them on their own social media posts or blogs.
Stream Your Timeline to Your Website
Nothing says, “Our business is engaged and active!” like having a live feed of your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter timeline on your website. All three services make it easy to embed your feed and give you certain style options to fit it into your design.
This is an excellent way to gain new social media followers by showing your website visitors the types of helpful and interesting content you post on social media and allowing them to sign up at the click of a button.
Improve Overall SEO Rankings
Having an active presence on social media helps your overall website SEO strategy. When you post links back to your site from your social media timelines, you’re creating good backlinks. And when others share your content on their pages, that means even more of them spidering out throughout the social platforms.
While Google doesn’t note social posts as a “direct” ranking factor, studies have shown that they do help improve SEO rankings. Bing on the other hand does use social posts as direct ranking factors in their search results.
Whether a direct or indirect ranking factor, social media posts improve your business’s visibility online and have a positive impact on overall SEO,
Turn Your Social Media Posts into Marketing Gold
Social media posts offer you marketing gold that can be mined well beyond the initial posting. With a little creativity, you can get the most out of them and generate new social media followers along with new business.
What social media platform gives you the most benefit for your IT business?
