Social media management is a integral part in modern inbound marketing, meaning many mom and pop businesses are now ditching the flyers in favor of tweets and FB posts for spreading the word about their shops. Unfortunately, they mistake spamming their followers with updates asking them “what their favorite day of the week for a picnic is” for successful social media management.
As a small company, you need to keep your social media content neat and informative if you don’t want to be wasting your time. That’s the way it needs to be done.
Social Media Management – The Competition
So you’re a small company looking to get some decent social media exposure and you are in the process of setting up your social media management plan. To learn how to get there, you look to the giants to figure out what they are doing right. It would make sense to imitate them, right? If they’re getting the likes and the followers than logically the same will happen for you. Makes sense. But does your small business have 10,000 mega centers all over America? Has your restaurant served over 99 billion burgers? If you have answered yes to any of these two questions, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be the owner of Wal-Mart or McDonalds, whose corporate brand is so powerful you can whistle their jingle in an empty street halfway around the world and a book full of their coupons would fall out of the sky and knock you out. Now, if you want a chance at sticking to the top of the search results page then you have to make quality content that will draw those with more interest than need to your site.
Why Quality is King
You won’t beat Apple in a 100 meter dash anytime soon, but you can always start preparing for the race. Your goal now is to build your audience, and audiences like to be entertained with what interests them, this is where you social media management plan should start. In this case, you happen to be the expert in what interests a particular niche and that is your best asset. Don’t waste your time posting jokes or asking whether your visitors like sesame seed versus plain buns – no one is coming to you to see that. Instead, tell them about some new breakthrough that was just leaked and how it’ll affect them, or start a giveaway for some of your “behind-the-scenes” collector goodies. Give the people a little insight into something they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, like concepts your company had that didn’t pan out, and you’ll have a follower base checking your site regularly even when there’re no updates. That’s something you have on McDonalds that they’ll never have.
You may not have as much as corporate brands do, but you have a thing or two in your corner that they can’t match and that’s how you’ll make yourself stand-out in the search results. Sure, if someone looks up, “Rachel Ray’s chrome kitchen set” then Wal-Mart and Target will be the first on the screen; but if you’re selling hand crafted concept chrome pieces, then that’s a search query you’ll beat them at 100% of the time, and you should make sure you associate yourself with that keyphrase through quality social media management as much as possible.
