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The Power of Social Media for SME’s: Win-Win Strategy.

Social Media has really buoyed up the spirits of present small and medium enterprises. SMEs feel marketing and promoting their product has become ever easy on social media. However, they are right only to a certain extent and rest half needs actual work.

Social Media pushes the boundaries of traditional marketing beyond locations and reach. It presents new challenges, opportunities and competition. One must also remember e-commerce comes into play. How do you ask?

Example: - I can view a product on Instagram, look it up on amazon and ship it from anywhere to my home.

Basically, competition is spread-out. Social Media has also opened new opportunities and threats to SME’s. At Present, one is determined to believe the pros outweigh the cons in large magnitude and it appears so. This reason is because of price, availability and supply. Yes, I can ship from anywhere but that will cost me more than shipping locally. I gave this introduction to help you understand that social media is a value tool and the more you look at it as a tool, the more you can leverage from it.

Remember, a tool has advantages and disadvantages.

Social media will not magically save your business and increase your profits. You need a strategy to use the tool and you must keep asking questions.

Here are some tips on how you can get the ball rolling:

1. Content: Primary reasons businesses fail to leverage social media is because they fail to provide valuable content. Content is very important. When people spend their time on your Facebook page, Instagram feed or any other social network you are present, people always look to have more interesting and light content.

Tell stories, be authentic and add pictures. A picture is worth a thousand               words and it applies a lot on social media. By increasing social awareness (supporting campaign likes #KnowYourLemons, #itaddsup etc...)

Source: https://bit.ly/2ABQURT

If you do support these campaigns in order to increase your followers, you are getting the idea wrong. Your mission is to add authentic value to the brand.

 2. Social Media Channels: As I emphasize in almost all social media articles, social media channels are to be picked with great care. Pick three channels: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Now, focus on improving your brand image only in these three channels. This will help you stay more accountable and responsible on social media. You will make proper use of social media. There is no point in having over six to seven channels and failing in all of them. The optimum number is five but three is a start. Your online presence matters. I have observed many businesses who has got presence in almost every social media channel and they have no impact in any of the channels. This is a total waste of time and effort. Never fall into this trap. This strategy will work for your personal accounts too.

 3. Consistency: Your feed is crucial and you must frequently update , tweak and post. When people follow you, your posts will show up on their feed and they choose to interact with it. All is good when you post frequently but never spam your people with back-to-back posts. You can use tools to schedule messages, posts and track your usage.

 Some of the tools are:

o   https://hootsuite.com

o   https://www.hubspot.com

o   https://meetedgar.com

o   https://tweetdeck.twitter.com

o   https://buffer.com

o   https://sproutsocial.com

           Source: https://bit.ly/2tvT6bl

4. Strategy: - Do you use Facebook or Instagram ads? What time are you going to post? Will you hire a social media manager or do it yourself? What is your feed going to contain? How will you increase engagement on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? These are some of the questions you must answer and this will help you lay out a well-defined strategy. You are a business owner and you know the benefits of a good strategy. It will help you have a plan of action and measure results accordingly.

 There you go, you have basic elements required for your brand’s success in social media.

Hope you succeed.

Good Luck.