FAQs

Social Media is essential when it comes to your business marketing strategy. Social media platforms help you increase brand awareness, connect with new and existing customers and generate new business.

Today, everyone uses social media to stay connected. It’s easy to set up pages and there are different ways on each platform to attract your target audience. Brand awareness is the number one way to stay relevant and gain new customers and keep existing ones. People turn to social media to see a company’s credibility, reputation and information regarding their services/products. All the different platforms provide several different audiences and ways to attract new customers. Highlighting your products and services has never been easier than with using your social media accounts to showcase what you and your business has to offer.

Need support? We’ve helped hundreds of business owners to shout about their products and services. Learn more about our Social Media Services here

This is a tricky question to answer but your decision should be based on 2 things…

1. Your Customer Profile – where does your perfect customer hang out? Try to dispel your own thoughts and look at the profiles for these platforms. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers which platforms they use and what for.

2. Which platforms do you enjoy creating content for and spending time on? – If you really hate Twitter it’s unlikely that you will do your best to make it work. On the other hand, you might really love Instagram and have the ability to take a really great photo so that platform will work great for you.

Number 1, however, is the most important!! There is no point being on a platform if your ideal customer isn’t there.

Remember it is better to do fewer platforms really well than spreading yourself too thinly.

Over 1 billion people are on Facebook and use the platform everyday whether it is to social network, advertise, research or just to stay connected. The easiest way for people to find your business is to make it as accessible as possible. Potential customers are likely to visit your Facebook page to see the most recent information, so it’s best to keep your page updated.

Posting on your Facebook page ensures that new and existing customers can stay updated and continue to see your activity. Regular posting on Facebook helps to build brand awareness and loyalty amongst followers.

Read our blog “How to promote your local business on Facebook page”.

Yes! The more information you post about your business, the more likely it is to be suggested across Facebook and search engines. Having your own business page ensures that people who are looking for you, your business or your products can easily find the relevant information. Facebook is a huge platform, so use it! You can gain a lot of quality leads and new customers from having easily accessible information.

Another benefit to having a Facebook page for your business is that it can give you a live feed of testimonials that everyone can see. Users can post reviews to your business page and recommend your business to others which drives engagement with new and existing customers. The reviews and communications from customers also help you to build a growth strategy for your business.

Not sure what to say on your Facebook Page? Here are 15 ideas!

Creating a presence on Facebook Groups ensures that your name is frequently seen. Giving advice, guidance and hints/tips on groups that reflects your business is more likely to bring in new customers. It not only shows that you know what you’re talking about, but it gives you merits on being customer focussed and reliable.

Customer engagement is the number one way to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Interacting and engaging with users improves your business reputation and increases your brand awareness long with your brand following and loyalty.

Join our Facebook Group for more hints and tips.

The best way to get new customers and retain existing ones is to keep active and remain relevant. Leading your own Facebook group is one way to stay connected and heighten your brand awareness. Facebook groups are designed to enable a group of people to interact around a common topic. Facebook groups for business is a fantastic way to promote and inform your customers about products, services events and company updates.

Having your own Facebook Group for networking will allow you to see which members are frequent visitors and potential customers. Monitoring this through Facebook reports can help bring in new customers, attract your target audience and see how many people you are reaching in real time with each post.

To find out more about the key benefits of Facebook Groups read our blog.

Facebook Advertising ensures that your page and content show up on potential customers’ news feeds. When people are interested or have done research on something that is relevant to your business/product type, Facebook algorithms highlight ads that are more relevant, e.g. yours. It is a great way to get quality new leads and therefore, bring in more business as the ads are promoted to people outside of your current following.

Find out more about Facebook Advertising here on our blog.

Instagram is a great way to increase your brand awareness. Not only can you post images to create a visual feed, but you can also sell through Instagram and have others tag your products/business. Instagram is a great way to put a face to your brand and connect with customers through imagery instead of text. Adding to Instagram ‘stories’ help you engage with your audience, holding polls, showcasing products, services and events helps drive more interest in your business.

Instagram is home to over 1 billion users. Whilst Facebook also has this number, 41% of Facebook users are over the age of 65, whereas Instagram is home to the younger generations. So really think about what your target audience is and who you want to reach and customise your social media marketing towards them.

To find out more about hashtags read our blog.

Instagram Stories lets you post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. Stories were launched in August 2016 and are now also available in Facebook.

Instagram describes Stories as something that lets you share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep on your profile. 

Instagram Stories allows you to give your audience a behind the scenes look of what is going on in your business.

Think of everything you do as a photo opportunity, meeting a new client, a new product that’s just arrived, a step by step tutorial on something you are making or an event your are attending. 

So a customer has posted a lovely image of your product on Instagram but how do you share that image with your audience?

Sharing or reposting as it’s called on Instagram is a little more complicated compared to the rest of the platforms as you will need a new app. Download ‘Repost for Instagram’ and follow the easy to use instructions.  

Instagram highlights give you the option to save stories so they can stay on your Instagram profile. These highlights will be shown under your bio on your profile.

To add to highlights you need to go to your profile and tap Story Highlights below your user name and bio. 

Using Twitter along with the other social media platforms allows you to create a successful social media campaign and increase your brand awareness. ‘Tweets’ have a limit of 240 characters meaning people can communicate in short messages and make the posts short and snappy and easier to read. Twitter is big on hashtags and what is trending both around the world and near you, using hashtags helps achieve maximum attention. Whilst Twitter used to be used mainly for text posts, now tweets with images get retweeted (shared) 150% more than those without so showcasing your products and services has never been easier.

Download our guide to Twitter here.

LinkedIn isn’t ubiquitous like Facebook. Or flashy like Insta. Or hot like TikTok. But for a surprising number of B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the most powerful marketing channel that no one (else) is talking about. According to Microsoft, LinkedIn’s revenue grew by 24% in Q2 2020.Let’s have a look at LinkedIn by the numbers so you can decide for yourself if LinkedIn’s juice is worth the squeeze:

LinkedIn has 700 million active users.
197M+ of those users are in North America and 211M+ are in Europe.
More than 30 million companies are on LinkedIn. Whilst LinkedIn was traditionally used for recruiting, it has increasingly become a marketing hub.
90 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers and 63 million are in decision-making positions.
94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing.
89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation.

You got to admit… these stats make a compelling case for investing in LinkedIn as a marketing channel, or at least giving it a serious second look.

Google My Business is a free tool that lets you manage how your business appears on Google Search and Maps to increase the ease of access to your business. It lets you update your business information as often as needed so potential customers are seeing only relevant information for contact, location, website and reviews.

Reviews are just as important now than ever before; customers can add their own reviews and the My Business page allows you to reply and monitor them.

Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organisations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps.

Read our blog for more information.

Facebook
Profile picture: 180 x 180
Cover photo: 820 x 462
Image post size: 1200 x 630

Instagram
Profile picture: 110 x110 (circular, so keep the image centred)
Photo size: 1080 x 1080
Stories 1080 x 1920

Twitter
Profile picture: 400 x 400
Header size: 1500 x 500
Image post size: 1024 x 512

LinkedIn
Company logo size: 300 x 300
Cover Photo: 1536 x 768
Business Banner image: 646 x 220
Image post size: 1200 x 1200 (desktop)/1200 x 628 (mobile)

The dimensions tend to change over time, so check back here from time to time to gather the correct sizes for your social media posts!

Your profile picture and cover photo are the first thing that people see. Use your logo for your business page profile picture to make your company easily identifiable when using the search tool. Your cover photo should be something that relates to your company and helps identify what you offer, whether that is an image of your product, your strapline or a type of service. Get creative but stay on brand.

A blog is an informational piece of writing to highlight a certain topic of your choice. Writing small articles about your business/products highlights your services and makes finding you easier. The more you talk about your business, the more people will talk about you. You become easier to find and will therefore have more hits to your website and quality leads for new business.

Blogging for business is very straightforward. It ranks your website higher in Google searches and therefore increases your visibility, meaning potential customers will come across your website first.

Read our blog “4 Reasons You Should Start a Blog for your Business”.

Each social media platform is different. Therefore, different strategies need to be applied. Some need images, some use hashtags, others are more business to business and others are more business to consumer. With so many different strategies a one-size fits all approach just doesn’t work.

Read our blog “Linking social media accounts what a mistake”.

Social media scheduling tools can help you operate your accounts efficiently. They also give you time to create and push more content.

It depends on what you are trying to achieve…. Different tools work best for different platforms. For example, Facebook has its own scheduling tool within the Creator Studio so we would recommend using that if you are looking to schedule on Facebook. Other scheduling tools include Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweet Deck.

A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#) used across social media. Each tag identifies messages on a specific topic and groups all activity that falls under the same topic together. This ultimately creates a hyperlink. Using hashtags is an effective way to help spread your message without paying for advertising; whenever someone follows/views the hashtag, your content will appear along with it. Hashtags filter through all online content to show only the relevant information to do with the specific topic.

Many businesses use their own hashtags to grow their engagement with their audience. Hashtags are a fantastic way to start an online campaign for your business which eventually leads to better customer engagement and new business generation.

Download our guide to Hashtags here.

Content can be tailored to each different account to attract the relevant audience by increasing your brand awareness. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter are great ways to pull in new customers – the more you’re seen, the more new business you will attract.

Each different platform suits the needs of your business differently. For example, if you are a florist- Facebook and Instagram may be better suited to you as you can showcase your products with imagery. However, if you are a financial organisation, LinkedIn may be the best solution for your business to utilise to attract the correct audience. It’s all about finding which platform works best for you and your business.

Read more about Customer profiling here.

If you’re running out of content ideas or find that your posts are becoming repetitive, creating branded national day posts can be a good start. Using popular dates to attract more eyes to your page is a good way to increase your brand awareness.

Get interactive; all social media platforms offer different ways for you to interact directly with your customers; start polls and quizzes to stay relevant. This is also a fantastic way to find out what attracts more of your audience to your pages and therefore will help you to create bespoke marketing for your audience.

Download our 150 content ideas here.

Yes, social media is all about networking. Following other relevant people/businesses will bring you a new level of social media marketing. This helps spread brand awareness and makes what you post reach the correct people. When you follow another page, you also get suggested to be followed. Also, the more you interact with other users/pages the more visible you will be to users who are not already in your following.

Follow people and pages that are relevant to your business; popular posts are a great way to drive more audiences to your site, so share something that applies to your business. This will attract eyeballs to your social media pages, and ultimately, your website.

Every social media platform is different: it is all about being visible, helpful, engaging and entertaining and showing up consistently.

Many platforms have ‘stories’ that you can utilise; these only last for 24 hours so your company can add to these throughout the day to create short, exclusive content that doesn’t clog up the feed on your page.

These stories can be interactive too, with quizzes, polls and questions that your audience can get involved with. This will give you a direct contact with potential and existing customers.

Ultimately though it is all about showing up consistently!

Find out more about the “stories” function on our blog.

Every business and audience are completely different. However, there is one thing that remains the same no matter which type of business you run.

You need to show up CONSISTENTLY and you need to appeal to your target audience. There is no magic formula, no special time of day or week. No number of characters in a post that will perform better. Just show up, talk to your customers and BE YOU!

Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a web page. This does not include paid placements/ads.

The better the SEO, the higher your website will place on search engines. Using keywords throughout your website and social media will make a big difference in making you easier to find; if those same keywords are used on a search engine, your website will be one of the first to appear. That is why it is so important to stick to one tone of voice throughout your social media marketing.

Social media can be an amazing business asset; it not only helps generate new business, but also creates a presence that ensures existing customers never forget about your business. Social platforms help you connect with customers, increase your brand awareness and ultimately boost your sales leads.

Social Media marketing is not only a great way to attract more customers but also to evidence the fact that you are a credible business. By highlighting your brand and voice throughout your social media platforms, you can provide an undertone to your business, telling the story of what services you offer and how you do it.

Organic reach is the number of people who see your content on that specific social media channel without it being through a paid promotion. It includes people who are shown your posts in their own feed/timeline or because their friends/people they follow have interacted with you. On the other hand, paid reach is the number of people who have seen your content as a result of paid promotions.

A question we are often asked is whether organic reach is dead, here’s what we have to say about it: https://pieceofcakemarketing.co.uk/is-facebook-organic-reach-dead/