February 8, 2025
Author: Elliot Park, Brookville Chamber Intern
Technological advances in our society have brought up an array of new trends, tools, and techniques that continue to take over the world as we know it. One of these great advances include the development of social media (SM), which has become a pillar for a diverse array of individuals. With an increase in attention and interest on a variety of SM applications, individuals are spending more and more time “scrolling through their feeds”. Thus, the shift of focus from business leaders and organizations to utilize SM as an effective marketing tool has begun. Utilizing SM as a business leader and marketing tool can provide many benefits such as increased brand awareness, further customer reach, and the building of a community. Although many organizations and business leaders are on SM and know the benefits from it, many struggle with utilizing the different applications effectively to maximize these benefits.
Steps to for Effective Use
There are many steps that can be taken to enhance one’s understanding and utilization of SM, but here are some of our recommendations:
- Develop a SM strategy – just like any other part of your organization, utilizing social media comes with developing a strategy and plan for what to post (content), how to post, and when to post (timing). When developing a strategy, it is important to address all these areas, while also touching on identifying the target audience, the chosen applications, and a budget (if needed).
- Be active – don’t create a profile on a SM application if it is not going to be used. Inactive profile/accounts can cause confusion and a questionable reputation among a community. Posting, liking, commenting, sharing, and building connections (followers and following) are an easy way to stay active and build meaningful connections.
- Engage & connect with your target audience – Once identifying your target audience it is important to engage with them and start to build long-lasting relationships. Entering in promotional giveaways can be a great way to engage and create interactions with your followers (audience). It is more than just posting your own content, search your feed for user-generated content to repost, reply to questions/comments/concerns from individuals, and join in our recent trends.
- Collaborate with others – build connections & relationships with surrounding business/organization by following, liking, and sharing their posts. At the end of the day, we cannot succeed without the help of others, so by collaborating with other organizations can help to take your SM presence to the next level. It can be as simple as creating a consensus with others to help promote each other on social media.
- Build a brand identity & social persona – Brand identity means to be consistent in your actions across social media, well actually the internet as a whole. Using consistent logos, language, fonts, and colors is one easy way to help start building your brand identity. Within your brand identity it is important to create a social persona, which is a fictional, human-like portrayal of your organizations, allowing followers to see a more of a “human side” of the organization. A social persona can also help make the business or organization more relatable to followers as well. The combination of these two elements allows for an easily recognizable way for your individuals to identify your organization, while also fostering consistency across your organization.
Overall, technological advances and the shift of interest & attention on SM has changed the way businesses and business leaders can utilize social media as an effective marketing tool. Although it can be very beneficial to use for organizations, many lack the knowledge to maximize the benefits. Following some of the simple steps listed above, can help businesses and their leaders effectively use SM as a marketing tool, while maximizing the benefits offered.