Most often small and mid-size business dive into social media and engage in heavy time consuming activities such as tweeting and updating Facebook status. But it’s only after sometime that they begin to realize no traction and get disappointed by social media. The problem is not social media, but the false level of expectation that company have out of social media. Social media like all the other media has certain limitations and hurdles that need to be understood and overcome, this means getting your expectation matched with your activities.
Source : toolan.de
One of the key reasons that company engage in social media activities is brand awareness. Beside brand awareness, companies are also fairly looking at leads generation which is attainable with some hard amount of building your brand in social media. It takes a long time to gather around enough crowds to start generating leads out of them.
So how do a company go into creating awareness about their company? There are essentially four major steps in to getting your company visible in the crowd.
1. Get a blog
First and foremost, without any delay, you need to get your blog set up along with your website. Blog is a very essential ingredient of social media marketing which should not be missed at any cost.
Blog allows company to communicate value of your product or service and share valuable information about your industry. Valuable information type articles such as HOW TO DO will interest more visitors to your site. This will make your blog more valuable for your readers and attract more visitors. Also, it must be made sure that the blog contains all the aspect of social media sharing implemented.
2. Hang out in discussion forums
In addition to creating your own content and distributing, there are many forums and discussion groups available along with popular ones such as Facebook and twitter. By engaging in meaning conversation and discussion, you can get yourself visible among a relevant crowd.
Following important and crucial blogs and commenting on them is also an essential part of social media activity which will bring more visibility to your company, just make sure that while commenting you have your company website linked to your profile. But commenting should not be overdone, or else it will be flagged as spam.
Joining LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups is also essential to listen to what others are saying about the industry trend and participate in them.
3. Project your thought leaderships
Throughout the process of engaging, creating content and distributing them, company should always try to project their thought leadership. It is crucial for companies to try to be leaders in their industry rather than just followers. In that aspect, there are many ways in which company can lead a industry, through design, technology, process or philosophy. There are ample examples of company doing great in social media through their unique approach to the problem.
4. Create your own community
Creating, distributing, connecting and engaging are only first step towards building awareness towards your company. In addition to all this, you also need to encourage your connection to join your own group so that you can own a platform through which you can regularly reach to the interested people and keep building the size of the community to reach more and more people.
Once the community is stabilized through good number of crowd, it will be easier to reach out to more audience in the internet.
