Samantha Collier
Do you have customers who’ve liked your small business on Facebook? Followed you on Twitter? Pinned you on Pinterest? Are clients and prospects connected to you on LinkedIn? If the answer is yes, the holidays are the perfect time for you to post, tweet, pin and connect your way to business success.
When it comes to holiday marketing, social media is the small-business powerhouse.
If you’ve been working on your social media activities, you have a built-in following to leverage throughout this all-important holiday season. Even if you’ve been slow to get on the social media bandwagon, the holidays give you the perfect reason to increase your social media activities.
Social media is a powerful tool for deepening relationships exactly when you want customers to remember you most.
- Create meaningful content
The key to success with any social media marketing is creating content that resonates with your followers. Even if all you post are updates on discounts, new products or services, or even holiday hours, if your customers are interested in that information, it will catch their attention.
Keep these tips in mind when crafting your posts:
- Be brief
- Use active language
- Ask questions: “Is this on your wish list?”
- Encourage shares with wording like: “Share it if you want it!”
- Link to a page on your website
- Use pictures
Data show that pictures significantly increase interaction on every social media platform. So find photos or videos to accompany every Facebook or Pinterest post and many of your Twitter and LinkedIn posts. Take photos yourself, or find inexpensive pictures from one of the many stock photography sites.
- Be efficient
Your time is always valuable, but it’s even more in demand during the busy holiday season. So use a social media management tool, such as Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com), to pre-post and schedule all your social media activities. From the Hootsuite dashboard, you can write posts for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, WordPress and other sites.
- Choose the best platform
Choose the one or two best social media sites for your business, and stick with those. Where do your customers or potential customers hang out online? Facebook works the best. It’s the most powerful in terms of narrowly targeting exactly the kind of customers you want to reach.
- Post at the right time and the right amount
How much you should post depends on your small business and your audience, but as a general rule, post weekdays, midday, Eastern time. Post to Facebook three to five times a week, on LinkedIn once a week, and on Twitter a few times a day.
So after you finish reading this column, I want you to do something right away: Take out your phone, take a photo of something you want to sell or a picture of something at your place of business, and post it on the social media site you’ve chosen. If you’re on Facebook, you might also want to spend a few dollars boosting your post so it reaches more people. The important thing is to get started, right now, while the holiday season is in full swing.
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