Social media is absolutely essential to any modern day business. Media channels including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn provide an essential communication point between business and consumer. Ten years ago sites such as Myspace and Digg were in there ascendency, now they are nowhere to be seen as new formats are in control. Social is always changing and business must adapt!

It is vital that businesses fully understand how social media can be maximised for marketing, in order to generate positive outcomes. By making the most of social media you are impacting on the following:

1) Building your brand – By being on social media you are generating a face for your business

2) Being recognised as an “influencer” in your industry – this helps your business become a “go-to” source and to generate relationships

3) Generating leads – By generating new connections you are creating new opportunities for sales

4) Generating sales – the ultimate goal for any business

Analyse your Twitter

Twitter is one of the most immediate ways of communicating with your audience. Customers now demand more communication from brands than ever before. To ensure you get noticed, social media tools such as Tweriod can help you to judge what time your audience are tweeting. This will allow you to tweet at the optimum time to generate engagement.

Research has shown that between the hours of 9am-11am and 7pm-10pm and the busiest for social media use.

Remember Hashtags

Hashtags can provide a great way to generate followers, gain further reach and enable engagement. It is important that you target the best and most appropriate audience on Twitter. By using hashtags you can promote your content.

Keep an eye on what is trending and, if appropriate, generate content around the trending topic.

Create visual content and share!

An image or video can have an immediate effect on social media users, whist offering the opportunity for shareability. According to statistics, a photo can boost the chance of a re-tweet by 35%.

Mobile use is constantly increasing

One trend that keeps coming back is the rise of mobile devices. Make sure you are connected to mobile-based social apps including LinkedIn and Instagram, amongst many others. More importantly, ensure that your company website is responsive for mobile and that it can be successfully accessed via a mobile device.

With the recent announcement from Google that mobile websites have to be optimised, ensure that your site is technically sound as well as checking that your social channels are tidy and provide all correct information which is accessible.

Have you refreshed your social media strategy? If you have, tell us about how you changed it and how your business improved below!

By Matthew Langham, Content & Online PR Executive at Search Laboratory.

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