(Video) What's The "Best" Way To Market A Small Business On Social Media?
I recorded this video for LinkedIn and it had 594 views which I was kinda pleased with! One of those when you go back and watch it you give yourself the little Anthony Michael Hall Breakfast Club “good job” self-punch in the shoulder. I liked it enough that I wanted to post it here as well. I also transcribed it pretty close to word for word if you’d like to read instead of / in addition to watching it. So what’s the BEST way to market a small business on social media? See below….
Here is the transcription:
“Hey everybody Doug Cohen here - M10 Social as well as Frameable Faces Photography which is where I’m recording this from with a question and an answer about the best way to market a small business on social media! What’s the best approach to digital marketing? Hmmm…. Well, here’s the thing. With the various platforms and the apps you use to do this whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or whatever it is, if you ask 10 marketers some specific questions about these platforms and how to use them you’ll probably get 10 different answers and most of them will probably be………..right! There’s so many different ways to approach it. Different brands, different tactics.”
“I’ll give you a prime example - let’s just take Snapchat because this is something that just happened at our studio Frameable Faces. A year or so ago when Instagram started to adopt stories and steal that from Snapchat a lot of marketers said ‘That’s it - that’s the last straw. Snapchat is dead!’ They were saying that a year ago and I said ‘No. Snapchat was fine before the marketers started showing up and it will be fine after the marketers leave because the teenagers are still using it.’ For our studio that’s who we’re trying to market to in a lot of cases. So we had a high school senior-to-be here in the studio yesterday who is a spokesmodel representing Frameable Faces for the class of 2020. She will be posting on social media and we are marketing with her images and behind the scenes video. I told her to feel free to post some of this stuff on her stories during the time she was here for her session, and I said ‘By the way which do you use more for your stories Instagram or Snapchat?’ She said Snapchat without hesitation. Random high school senior? Snapchat! In this case anyway - and she’s not just speaking in a vacuum. No teenager does - she’s speaking for her friends, her scene to a degree. She’s using Snapchat more than Instagram and those are the people we’re trying to reach. Meanwhile we posted stories on Instagram and Snapchat from her session - different content but still in the ‘stories’ at the same time of day on two platforms we’ve been using for years and almost all of the people who use both follow us on both. I don’t know exactly how many followers we have on Snapchat and there are multiple factors that impact reach but the fact is we got 4 times the views on Snapchat than we did on Instagram.
“Now Instagram still serves its purpose for us, and I’m NOT trying to argue that Snapchat is trending in a more positive powerful direction than Instagram as a whole - not saying that at all. I’m just saying it’s not “dead”. Now for some brands it might be - I would never tell a heating and cooling company to use Snapchat to start marketing. Teenagers aren’t buying furnaces. So it just depends on the platform, on the content, on the culture of your company, the kind of job you’re doing with your brand offline that will resonate online (more on that in an upcoming post), what kind of language you’re using, what kind of content you’re posting. And as you approach this if you’re going to bring someone in from the outside to help you with your content or flat out create your content for you, find somebody that understands your brand and has the right vision with the right sense of humor for what you’re trying to get across and then go with it! The answer to what’s the best way is that there IS no single best answer of how to market your business on social media. There’s some basic philosophy that is tried and true that you shouldn’t ignore like taking your content on social media and using it to drive traffic to your owned online assets like a blog or a website - those kinds of things are very important. But in terms of how you go about it on a tactical day-to-day basis, where you promote, how you promote, what your target should be with boosted, paid, organic reach or any of these things? It’s complicated. But for your brand it might not be. You just need to find someone who gets it for your brand and you need to attack it the way it makes sense for you. Not because some marketer tells you this is the way it HAS to be done. There’s not just one way - there’s multiple ways. And that’s my message to you. What’s the best way? It all depends…. “
Let me know what YOU think in the comments below!
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com.
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