A business guide round social media

Social media is awesome and businesses need to embrace that but whilst most big businesses have a social media presence they don't use it to their advantage.

It is a very common sight to have businesses post a few photos on their Instagram or a few posts on twitter all of which seem to make little sense for their business, you don't have to be like that and I definitely advise you to learn how social media works, it's a long process but its definitely worth it.

Let's go over the basics first social media has 2 main purposes: 1. to entertain and 2. to inform. every successful post video or anything has to fulfil one of the two purposes or both in such a way that it provides real value to the viewer so either they learned something new, solved their problem or they were entertained.

Note that every successful post has to provide value to the viewer in some way or another otherwise, they will not return to that post or your channel/ account because they will see no point in doing so as it does not provide them with any additional value.

People don't like wasting their time and if your posts do not provide any value then you are simply wasting their time which isn't nice, you don't want to do that. what you want to do is engage people with your content and keep them coming back to your channel thankfully there are a few tried and tested strategies that you can use.

First of all, you have to set your tone, style of content and the actual content itself to suit your potential customers. There is no point creating just whatever if your customers will not watch it, you have to target your content towards the kind of people that are likely to buy your products or at least have something similar so that you can become well known in that particular field. so example lets say you are producing camera stands or any camera gadgets then have a photography channel where you explain how to do photography to people or share great photos with people and where you can show off your product (but don't overdo it on the promotion remember to be subtle this is about creating content for people it's not a marketing pitch).

Once you've established what you're going to do on social media then its time to produce content. when doing this you have to keep in mind that it will take a long time to get traction and that not everything you do will be perfect. what you have to do is produce to the best of your ability and do it consistently after a while you will be able to look at the analytics and find out what works and what doesn't. But there are a few ground rules that you have to follow when creating content. You have to be consistent, you have to maintain a single style for all of your content and you have to maintain a certain quality standard.

The best business channels will not even feel like a business channel they will look like a channel that has been created for a specific purpose other than businesses. To make a corporate channel that feels personal you have to keep the same person doing most of the presentation work so for example if you have a youtube channel than have one person presenting it not a dozen, of course, you can have more people appearing from time to time but you have to keep one person who will be on all the time so that your audience can develop a personal connection with said person that connection is very important in making the channel feel more personal and less corporate. but if you really want to achieve a personal connection with your audience than you have to make the channel personal and not formal you have to include a bit of personal story and allow for unscripted moments and places where your presenter or you can get a bit more personal and emotional. In short, you have to make the channel like a person and not a formal corporate organisation. Social media is a personality business made by people, in such a world formal corporations have no chances of survival.

The best channels no matter whether they are corporate channels or private they all provide massive value to the consumer of their content i.e. they are either extremely entertaining, informative or both. meaning that you either watch them because you like watching them, because you want to solve a particular problem or want to get educated about some topic. These channels are always inviting to look at and hook you in as soon as you view their content so that you want to return and watch more of their videos they may do this in different ways but you always receive something by viewing that particular piece of content whether its information or entertainment it doesn't matter but their content always provides you with something and isn't just bland and boring.

Have you ever seen a very successful channel that has only a few posts because I have not. one of the keys to a successful channel is being consistent and putting your best foot forward every single day think of it this way every time you hit the publish button its another chance for your channel to be spotted its another chance that somebody may view it and recommend your content to a friend that's how people grow on social media getting a single view when you have 10 is just as hard as getting a hundred when you have a thousand or a million if you have 10 million seriously it's like an avalanche, in the beginning, there's a little stone it hits other bigger stones and they fall together now the more stones you have the more stones they will hit increasing the speed at which this avalanche is growing that's how you grow on social media first small then big you can't be big from the start.

And lastly, successful channels don't exist in a vacuum they communicate with their audience not just through their posts, they answer to comments and talk to their audiences. They also interact with other media channels because its a lot harder to go at it alone that's why many YouTubers are friends with other YouTubers because they work together on many aspects and support each other throughout the process.