Written by So many companies make the same fatal flaw on social media. They think of themselves as a business instead of a human, and start doing what they think businesses do. But wouldn’t thinking like a human give you a better idea of what other humans want to see?
People aren’t going to willingly subscribe to what you have to say if you aren’t providing value. If your main focus is on self-promotion and making money, what are your followers getting out of it? Are you still following the annoying family member who constantly posts offensive opinions and political rants? How about the one that keeps trying to get you to buy into their pyramid scheme?
If people won’t even follow their own flesh and blood on Facebook, then you better bet they won’t be lining up to hear a stranger give them the same sales pitch day after day.
So if you aren’t supposed to use social media to increase sales, then what is it for?
Establish Your Brand
Social media is inundated with advertisements and self-promotion. When you share valuable content that educates or inspires your customers, it stands out, and they reward you with brand loyalty that far outlasts any traditional advertising campaign.
Connect on a Personal Level
Social media was designed to be social. Before Facebook came along, brands had no way to communicate with their individual customers on such an intimate level. Use this to your advantage!
Making a customer feel valued and seen is one of the most effective ways to earn their loyalty. If a customer feels like your brand is more of a friend than a business, they will feel a deep, genuine connection that ad agencies were only dreaming of achieving 30 years ago.
Grow Your Online Following
This is the goal that will translate directly into financial gain and it’s no mystery why. More eyes on your product/company = More revenue
But growing your online following is no easy task, especially in the early stages. No one expects much from an account that only has 10 followers. So what do you do when you get stuck at 300 followers and you’ve already pestered all of your friends and family?
It starts with sharing content that people are actually interested in. If you fill your recent posts with relevant, useful, or entertaining content, people will be drawn to your page. I like to describe a business’ social media accounts as a garden where their customers are the pollinators. If you raise a healthy garden, pollinators will visit often and share the news with the rest of the colony. If you stop watering your plants and chase after butterflies with a net you’re less likely to catch one, and infinitely less likely to catch them all. To read more about this analogy, visit our Content Garden blog post.
Unfortunately, creating good content isn’t enough anymore. Facebook’s algorithm has changed over the years, making it increasingly difficult for business pages to get the attention of new customers without paying to promote themselves.
The good news is that acquiring an online following is probably a lot cheaper than you’d expect. It typically costs less than $20 to get your content seen by 1000 unique people on Facebook, so if you’re sharing content that people are actually interested in, you can grow your brand significantly for a small price.
Real World Example
An example of one of our larger clients is SGT Knots, the #1 online rope retailer. They wanted to position themselves as “The Rope Authority” so we created rope-related educational content, covering topics like knot-tying tutorials, paracord survival tips, DIY crafts, rope information guides and much more. The result is an average of 100k organic monthly visitors to their social media accounts and 100s of leads generated every week. All without paying anything for advertising.
If you’d like to see some of what we did for SGT Knots, visit their social media channels by clicking the images below.
karmacultivate.com 