The alarm on your phone goes off like clockwork. Time to face the day, get showered and face traffic like every other day. You’re not a nine to fiver so your reasons for driving into work are a lot different than most. You are a business owner. With 100’s of to do’s on your plate, when do you find time to log into Facebook and write a post, jump on twitter and send out a tweet, or upload a photo on Instagram and hashtag the crap out of it?
Sorry to say this but you really do need to make time. 41% of Americans say that it’s important to them that the businesses they engage with have a strong social presence. The days of relying on traditional media as your main strategy is quickly falling in the backdrop of Social Media and you need to adapt now before your audience is swooped right from under your feet.
LOCATION IS EVERYTHING
British real estate tycoon, Lord Harold Samuel coined the phrase location, location, location. What is the importance of location? It’s everything! Most business owners that open a store front normally search high and low for the perfect location. They look for a major intersection, high trafficked streets and clusters of popular retail stores. It’s all about visibility and accessibility and this applies to social media.
Our society has evolved from a face to face culture to a time where consumers are communicating and making buying decisions from the screen view of their digital devices from anywhere they choose to be. Knowing that social media is the virtual city where every business owner wants to plop down their four walls on should create a yearning and desire to do the same. Imagine starting a business and only opening the doors once every few months or even years? Preposterous! Yet, why is it acceptable to do this with your social media pages?
ATTENTION TO DETAILS
Business owners fall into the “Kids Christmas Present” syndrome. The magical day arrives when you open your Facebook Page. You play with the cover photo, profile picture, description and make a few posts…then it happens. You put it on the shelf never to give it your attention again. Social Media deserves your attention because your audience is congregating there every day.
The concept is quite simple…you place yourself in the center of your audience and ideal customers. Once you identify who your audience is, you then find out their behaviors, likes, dislikes and the commonality that connects your words together. You don’t have to hold a PhD to understand how social media works but it is a science.
Think of the power of social media sites, for example Facebook. According to recent studies, there are 1.28 billion daily active users on average for March 2017. According to their Data Policy, Facebook collects unlimited amounts of data while you are on their site as well as when you leave their site. The amount of data that you can learn from someone’s profile page is pretty remarkable.
GATHER INTEL IN MINUTES
Their entire life is laid out in the second column of your home page. What took months, if not years to gather before social media, takes a few minutes a day to learn the ins and outs of someone. You can scroll through your newsfeed and understand how someone is thinking, what they’re feeling, identify their circle of support and influence, who they gravitate to, what interests them the most and their daily activities.
There’s a saying, “Data delivers dollars” which positions yourself as a business owner to profile your audience and build your content, interaction and responses according to your audience which in turn leads into sales. In March 2015. Ryan Stewman created a video on this technique which he calls Social Reconnaissance.
Business owners tend to assume that using social media is not beneficial for their business, it’s a waist of time or they don’t have the time of day to keep up with their social media accounts. Social Media benefits all businesses, every minute you spend on social media is time well spent and you can’t afford to ignore the power of social media. You either keep up or it will pass you by.
