A tweet a day might not bring new customers right away, but it’s a start. My name is Naomi Burgess and if you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering if you should have an online presence or expand your current one.
Starting with Social Media
I strongly believe that each company, no matter how big or small, should have an online presence in this day and age. After all, over 75{71f0b96d7fb9125465257c4beabfd4b54654a6dcc01d6b761d78baf7e14996ab} of the UK population accesses the Internet on a daily basis and most of them look for products and services online. If you don’t have at least a social media account, you’re practically invisible to them – even if you have a Yellow Pages listing, customers aren’t likely to trust someone about whom there’s zero information on the Internet.
Set up Social Media Sites
As I’ve said earlier in the post, setting up a Twitter account would be a good first step towards establishing your online presence. Creating an account on Twitter is very simple and doesn’t require you to know anything about making websites. After you create an account, you can easily begin to connect with your customers and fellow professionals. It goes without saying that you should also look into creating accounts on other social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. The more active you are on social media, the wider net you’re casting for prospective customers.
Apply SEO
However, no matter how many social media accounts you create, they would be of little use to you if your company doesn’t have a website. There are many web developers and SEO specialists who can create a well-optimised, user-friendly webpage for your company for a reasonable fee. Customers pretty much expect you to have a website when they find you on Facebook or Twitter and if you don’t they’re unlikely to trust your business based on social media profiles alone. Besides, it’s much easier to learn about you and your products/services when they’re offered on a single website instead of spread out all over a social media page.
Online Accounts for Convenience
Both websites and social media also make it easier for customers to reach you in order to instantly resolve any query they might have. In today’s business world, most people prefer to communicate over e-mail and other electronic means of communication, rather than over the phone. If you haven’t provided your clients with such a means, they’re unlikely to ever order from you again. Your retention levels are almost certainly going to drop if this sort of thing keeps happening.
If you think you are small then you must build up online presence
If you’re still convinced that your company is far too small to take it online, try to answer this question – if most of your target audience is using the Internet on a daily basis, where are you supposed to obtain the revenue in order to grow and expand? After all, your sources of income are your customers and if they’re not noticing you, you’re not getting any revenue. If you’re online, you’re automatically visible to a much wider audience – the more people click on your website link or your social media profile, the higher the chances are of you selling more product than ever.
Interact with your audience
If you’re already online, chances are that you agree with most things I’ve written about on this post. However, what you should keep in mind is that the Internet doesn’t stay the same for long, and you therefore have to manage your content and update is as often as you can. If you’ve created a website several years ago and haven’t updated it since then, it’s unlikely to be visible the way you want it to be. Same with Twitter and other social media – having a profile doesn’t mean that you have a “presence”. Following and “liking” other people’s pages is the bare bones of what you can do with social media – write your own posts and promote your company through it. And don’t forget to engage with clients through the networks – each customer loves to be appreciated.
Your Social Media accounts are your online representatives
It would be correct to say that business cards and shop windows have been all but replaced by social media profiles and websites respectively. If your company isn’t active on the World Wide Web, it can generally be considered “inactive” in this day and age and is invisible to a huge chunk of your target audience. I urge you, therefore, to consider some online presence strategies and implement them as soon as possible.
