Top 7 Social Media Your Business Needs Part-3

4.LinkedIn – Company Pages

LinkedIn has around 97 Million active uses as of August 2015, though they have around 300 million profiles. So it’s not the biggest network out there and hold on a minute didn’t we say above that Instagram has 300+ million. Why is it in 4^th in this list? Well it’s the biggest dedicated business-oriented social networking service.

It’s often referred to as “social media’s equivalent of an awkward networking event”, I know many people that have profiles on there, but don’t use it through fear of using it wrong.  We won’t get into the how to setup your personal profiles today, but it should be something you at least get a handle on. Today we will be focusing in on the company pages.

The LinkedIn Company Pages allows business & companies to showcase their products and services as well as enable employees to connect with their employers. Currently the information you can show about your products and services is by far the most in-depth of all the social media platforms. Whether it’s sharing company updates, promoting or expanding your products or service offerings, or its primal B2B marketing. LinkedIn has many cool offerings for you to get in front of a completely different audience.

The main points to remember when marketing your business on LinkedIn are:

1. Get insights with Company Analytics. You can identify trends across key metrics and understand more about your follower demographics.
2. Link to you Company Page via your website, blog roll, other social media, this will increase your traffic and followers.
3. Leverage your employees, another good source of traffic can come from your employee’s profiles on LinkedIn. You can also ask your colleagues to share your company updates on their personal profiles, allowing you to spread you message to their first degree network. Your employees can also create content for your company page.
4. Invest in followers. You can use Follow Ads to attract a key audience that you are trying to reach. Follow Ads can be targeted to members in a specific companies, industries and regions.
5. Rich Media Content – As with every other social media out there. New exciting visually appealing content will win the day. The same rings true with LinkedIn. Images, infographics, videos and slide share presentations will keep things fresh and exciting for your followers.
6. Feature your Content. Pinned Updates ensure that your most important content gets the spotlight on your Company Page.
7. Start Conversations, discussions with your followers. Ask questions, share information and generally interact with them. Provide content what will help in solving their issues, or give expert advice on topics of concern.
8. Sponsored Updates – Sponsor your best content to raise greater brand awareness and generate quality leads by content marketing direct to people’s feeds on all devices.
9. Showcase Page – If your company has more than one business or brand, then showcase pages are something you will want to take advantage of. It gives you the ability to highlight individual businesses and / or brands to targeted audiences.

 5. YouTube – for Business

Fifth in our list is the Google-owned company and the second-largest search engine in the world is YouTube. Not everyone will see YouTube as the best social media offering for their business at first, and in the end that might be right. However, I can promise you there is a place for your business on youtube. It doesn’t matter if you’re a mechanic or a fitness guru, a computer technician or a carpet cleaner. People want to hear from you if you can present a certain skill set and convey a message or instructions to solve issues of problems, you can get followers and generate leads.

You can create educational or entertaining content and you don’t need a production studio behind you. All you need is a webcam and you are good to go. Give your follows the advice and provide insights, something good value and they will remember you when it comes time to buy something down the line. Never use YouTube for a hard sell, it’s better as a community-building resource, as well as an excellent blog and content resources for all your other social media platforms. As we have said above video is one of the more engaging forms of content.

The main points to remember when marketing your business on YouTube are:

1. Put thought into your Title – Like a good blog post, please always weigh up the option to click by the title. So make it something engaging, with keywords and phrases that describe what people may be searching for.
2. Choose the Right Tags and Category. YouTube will usually suggest some, choose these but also choose a few of your own, some you might use if you were trying to search for the content that your video is supplying.
3. Keep the content coming. If you can do weekly or fortnightly even monthly videos your following will grow over time. It can be webcast, webinars, slide shows or photos. Maybe a company history or corporate profile. In some cases employee profiles are good so your follows can develop more trust with your business.
4. Collaborations are a great way of getting content. Maybe interviewing other industry recognised a business that might complement your brand or product and service offerings. If you have collaborated with another business to provide a solution, then a quick case study and chat with a representative from that business to show how you both met the needs of the client, and how you provided the solutions to overcome any issues involved, might be an excellent bit of content for a potential customer to see.
5. Customer feedback. Let you customers give testimonials on YouTube. It’s a highly effective way to build a trusting relationship with your followers, and video testimonials are proven to have a much bigger impact than written ones.
6. Write a great description. Keep it short and to the point, yet informative. Maybe 2 sentences at most. Always use links to your blog and website.
7. Link with your Google + account. We covered this above.
8. Don’t just post on YouTube, use them on your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Read more in this series –

Part 1:  Facebook for business
Part 2:  Twitter & Google Plus for Business
Part 4:  Instagram & Pinterest for Business