8 social media top tips to fire up your business 

As daunting as social media can seem for your business, it isn’t all smoke and mirrors. Follow our top tips to improve your presence, gaining more attention and customers for your business. 

The first step you should take when approaching your social media is identifying and understanding your audience. It’s a good idea to write down who you want to target with your posts – is it new customers? Existing customers? Potential partnerships? Once you pinpoint exactly who your content is going to be aimed at, you can streamline the creation process and understand the tone your content should take. 

Create goals for your social media – what are you trying to achieve? Are you looking for a 10% increase in clients by next year? Perhaps you want to increase your follower count? Whatever your goal, make sure it is realistic. It is easy to struggle when your goal is too difficult to attain. 

Regularly assessing your progress will help you find out what is and isn’t working for you. It can sometimes be surprising what content works for your social media and it can be even more surprising when one piece of content works well on one platform and not another. Keeping a good habit of looking at what has been successful for you will help you create more engaging content in the future. 

Be wary of getting too attached to vanity metrics, however. It is much better to achieve a fewer number of likes but have your quality, informative content shared to potential customers than receive a high number of likes but gain minimal engagement and not reach many potential customers. 

Your business will likely have a few unique selling points (USPs), but some of these may not be immediately obvious to your followers. Make sure you brand yourself clearly and reiterate what makes you and your business so great. Maybe you pride yourself on leaving the room squeaky clean following a chimney sweep, or maybe you have years of experience in safely and effectively removing bird’s nests from chimneys. Tell your followers your USPs to stand out from the crowd and explain why they make you so brilliant – you may think they all know, but you never know when a potential customer is looking at your social media for the first time. 

Your USP can even be something as simple as your personality. Turn your personality into something that you can use in your business to make you stand out – if you’re a happy-go-lucky kind of person, let your branding and social media reflect this! Do not forget to tell your following about the quality work you do and why they should trust you once you’ve got them hooked using your USPs. 

Social media often lends itself to short, easily digestible content. Have you just installed a new wood burner? Refurbished a fireplace recess? Let your quality work do the talking. Quality photography and photos at the appropriate times do wonders and will grab the attention of customers and other registrants alike. 

Leading directly on from the previous tip, when people first discover your page, the first thing they are going to see is the images you have posted. These play an extremely important role in maintaining attention and enticing potential customers to dig deeper. 

As high-quality as your work may be, if this isn’t represented with a clear, well-lit, well-framed photo, it will not translate well. 

Consider before and after pictures – have you recently turned an old, tired open fireplace into a modern, stylish recess for a Cleaner Choice stove? This juxtaposition will demonstrate the clear improvement your services can bring and show your skills and knowledge to potential customers in zero words. 

Whilst following the previous tip is key, you still need to caption your posts. Consider relevant hashtags and related accounts and use these to help broaden your reach and inform your audience. 

If your content requires lengthy explanation, try splitting it up into bullet points or using emojis to break the flow – the average attention span across social media is less than nine seconds and a large paragraph will struggle to achieve its goal in this little time. If you have a blog, make the caption an introduction to the topic and then include a link to your blog, allowing viewers to read further. 

Posting regularly will help you find out what times you receive the most engaged and help you stick to a routine. As you gain a larger and more dedicated audience, posting at regular intervals will help to keep engagement high as your followers will be expecting your posts, rather than missing them as they were posted haphazardly. 

Make sure your social media accounts are clearly linked to your business and are easy to locate – you don’t want a satisfied customer struggling to find your accounts when trying to recommend you! 

Keep your contact details readily accessible, too – make your business email, phone number, and opening hours clear to avoid disappointment from potential customers. 

There is more to marketing your business than just social media but giving your customers a good first impression of your business with a quality, organised social media account is a big step in growing your business. 

As your following grows and you learn what works for you (and what is feasible) you will be able to create a personalised plan that will help you continuously grow your business.