Generating more awareness of your business on social media is all about harnessing the power of digital connectivity You have to make sure you’re posting regularly on social media and that your accounts have enough information on them.
It’s a little cliche, but no less true.
Our world is more connected than ever before.
As a result, social media has been at the forefront of brand and business awareness.
There literally is no better tool for creating awareness than social media.
The reality is that as the younger generations become older, the more social media is being used to do business.
10 (or even 5) years ago, people looking to build a home would call a building company and ask questions after first visiting their website and doing some research.
Now, those who are looking to build a home were 10 or 15 years old (5-10 years ago) and have grown up checking social media as a daily habit, meaning this is where they are most comfortable and where they want to do business.
We might not be at a place quite yet where the majority of your target market acts in this way. But with every passing year, we get closer to this being the case.
This is why understanding and mastering your social media presence is so important to your business growth.
While we wait until the majority of your target market wants to do business on social media, it’s important to understand that even if doing business isn’t the reason they’re on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, your target market is spending obscene amounts of time on these platforms.
Your target market is hanging out there.
So it makes sense to join them.
Optimising your social media accounts means more than sporadically posting and hoping it blows someone away enough for them to do business with you.
You need a strategy to make sure you have a cohesive online experience for your target market.
Visual consistency, tone of voice in your messaging and (crucially) a deep understanding of who your target market is (which is why we go through the market research process) are essential when looking to generate more awareness through social media.
With all of this in mind, there is an incredibly fundamental and basic action that most business owners can take, today, to start optimising their social media accounts.
We have encountered literally thousands of businesses social media profiles that don’t even have the most basic of information that potential clients and customers are looking for.
We have to assume that this is because the business owner has quickly set up the social media accounts and really doesn’t have much of a strategy behind doing so, other than “because it’s what a business should do”.
All accounts should have the following information, as an absolute minimum:
- Web address
- Location
- Contact phone number
- Short description of the offer/service
Imagine, you’re a mechanic – or a construction company, dentist, teeth whitening clinic… anything!, and a highly motivated (cash in hand, wanting to give you money) potential client comes across your social media account but quickly realises they have no idea if you’re located near them.
They don’t know how to contact you.
They want to look through your website, but there isn’t one listed.
Even if your phone number is on your social account (maybe it’s the only piece of contact info available), it’s easier for this person to find a different business online than it is to pick up the phone and give you a call.
Making sure your profiles have the right information – that potential clients are looking for – is crucial in a well-optimised social media strategy.
But how does this help in generating more awareness of your business?
The way social media platforms work is based entirely on algorithms, and while there have been millions of articles written on these algorithms and “how to beat them”, the reality is they basically just push popular content out to more people.
Take Instagram, for example.
At the time of writing this, their algorithm is built to do the following to every new post:
1. Show a new post to a small mix of account followers and random non-followers who IG have determined will likely enjoy your post
2. The post is then delivered to more (or less) people, depending on the reaction/engagement ratio it receives from the handful of initial people it is shown to.
3. This means that your post could be shown to 5 non-followers and 5 followers (5 is an entirely random number for this example).
If the post gets 1 engagement (like, share, follow, connect, etc.), IG determines the post has an engagement rate of 10% and might not show it to many more people.
If the post gets 7 engagements, IG determines the post has an engagement rate of 70% and will then push it out to many more accounts (say 100) and then test the engagement rate again.
If the post gets 80 engagements, IG determines the new engagement rate is 79% (87 engagements out of 110 accounts) and will keep pushing it to more and more people.
When your account doesn’t have an optimised profile (we’re not even talking about optimised posts here), potential customers and potential followers don’t engage with your account.
If your account isn’t getting engagement as a result of a poorly optimised profile, these social platforms simply will not show your content to others and this severely limits your ability to generate awareness through social media.