My Useful Guide: Understanding Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. Love it or hate it, social media is becoming increasingly commonplace for businesses globally.

With Facebook achieving 1 billion users online in a single day just last year and approximately half of the worlds internet users utilising a whole host of social media platforms, how important could social media be to you and your brand?

What are the benefits?

Social media platforms are a great way to increase traffic to your website. Without it you are relying on people who know your brand or those who stumble upon your website after searching keywords. A social media presence with consistent branding and interesting content can very quickly get you known and recognised with retweets, shares and likes alone. Not only that but social media can help to increase search engine rankings as you become recognised as a source of relevant information and accomplished in your field.

In a way social media acts as the biggest and best endorsement to your brand and its ethos. The more followers, likes and shares you have the more confident people will feel about your brand. The beauty of social media for marketing is that word spreads far, wide and fast. With every person that follows you, there is opportunity for more followers and more brand awareness.

Instead of you finding the clients, how about letting the clients come to you?

Social media is a great way to interact with an audience and offers the opportunity for followers to approach you. Talking to existing or potential clients on a friendly, helpful level removes a sense of mass marketing that can quite often be the feeling when using traditional adverts and flyers. Social media adds a human element to business, adding to that feeling of loyalty and trust amongst your audience. Support you show to customers can also be seen by a much wider audience, acting as a testament to your customer service and reliability.

With around 30 million UK users and new accounts becoming active each day, take full advantage of the free marketing available at your finger tips. All it requires is a bit of time and careful consideration but the results could be tenfold.

  

Here are a few cheeky pointers for improving a profile:

Logo

It is important to make sure that your logo not only represents you (have a read of our February blog post about logos) but is identifiable and is suited to sitting in a square. Don’t try and fit too much into a small profile picture, you need to be recognised at a distance in a long list of tweets, posts and shares. Use a symbol or an element of your logo to represent your brand and expand on this with the rest of your profile page.

Colour

This is a great way to make you stand out but it is also important that your customer base recognises you. There is no point in having an orange Facebook or Twitter profile if the rest of your branding is blue.

Layout

It’s easy to let Facebook or Twitter adjust your profile images and banners but you should take control of how your profile looks! Make sure that your images sit in your profile banner correctly and are clear and concise. Upload an image that fits the dimensions of the space and ensure that anything vital isn’t stuck behind the profile picture or profile name. Now that more and more of us use our mobiles to access social media it is vital that you profile banner works on both a computer screen and the mobile version. Remember that Facebook crops into you profile banner on the mobile site.

Which social media platform is for you?

There are a number of social media platforms available online and through mobile apps. Have a look at our useful download to see which social media could be best suited to you and pick up some more top tips.

Let us help you to create brand consistency across your social media platforms by contacting us for a quote or for inspiration have a look at our social media portfolio.