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There’s no question that building a social media presence for a brand takes time and a whole lot of effort, as well as strategic thinking.

But is implementing social media into your marketing strategy really worth it?

The short answer? Yes. There are one hundred and one reasons why small businesses should use social media if they’re not using it already. To break it down, here are 6 important reasons why.

1. Customers will become more familiar with your brand.

Having social media channels for your brand gives your brand a voice and personality. When you humanize your brand in this way, it makes you much more accessible to customers, makes it easier to build connections and develop customer loyalty. After all, people like doing business with other people, not robot-like companies. Additionally, a customer may be better acquainted with your brand after noticing your social media presence. Your followers share a piece of your social media content for others to see who may not have otherwise known about your brand.

2. You can learn more about your customers.

Using social media allows you to gain valuable insights about your audience and customers. Using tools such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics allows you to see the content you are producing which generates the most interest – ultimately what is working for you and what may need to be improved upon. This then allows you to strategically plan your content as per this behaviour.

3. And you can build connections with those customers.

While you’re getting to know your customers, with social media you’re fully able to build meaningful connections with them too. You can answer their queries and feedback directly, while simultaneously showcasing a high level of customer service for the public (and potential new customers) to see.

4. Website traffic will increase and SEO rankings will be enhanced.

Without social media, traffic to your site is limited to those already familiar with your brand and individuals searching for the keywords that you currently rank for. So it can be very difficult for potential customers to find you and become familiar with your brand. Each social media channel is a new path leading back to your website – and the more social media shares you receive as a result of producing quality content, the higher your search ranking will be.

5. You’ll be able to monitor competitors.

Social media allows small businesses to monitor their competitors like never before. This will help you to enhance your marketing strategy – perhaps offering something your competitors are missing – and it’ll help you stay on top of your marketing intelligence.

6. You can do it all with a very small budget.

In the beginning, building an online presence can be a little bit overwhelming, especially when you start delving into things such as Facebook and Twitter ads. But don’t panic – as you won’t have to worry about going over your budget. In fact, to engage with customers, increase traffic and enhance SEO rankings with social media, you need little to no budget at all. Advertising on social media tends to be relatively cheap, and once you get the hang of it you can tweak it how and when you like, whatever way works for you and your brand.

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Car Finance NI

Did you know that Pinterest is one of the largest traffic drivers globally?

Many people are still very confused as to how to use Pinterest for anything other than pinning mouth-watering photos of food and getting inspiration for your future wedding. As with any social media platform, if you approach it strategically you can really make it work for driving traffic and awareness to your brand. Once you get the hang of it, it’s actually a rather easy and engaging (and highly addictive) platform to use.

So here are our top tips how to use Pinterest for your small business.

Pin Selectively But Consistently

As with any social media platform, it’s important to stay consistent. It’s no good to log on, pin like crazy for about an hour then disappear for a week or two. Pinning around 20-30 pins a day or every day keeps your profile balanced and consistent and will keep users coming back for more. At the same time, it’s important to be selective about the kind of content you pin – there’s no point pinning something irrelevant to your brand, or even worse, something that might constitute a bad reflection on your brand.

Organise Your Boards

Allow your Pinterest profile to have purpose and clarity by keeping it organised, as after all, it is a representation of your brand. Categorise your boards by subject/theme and focus on them, delete all irrelevant and unused boards to ensure your profile looks neat and aesthetically pleasing – after all, Pinterest is an incredibly visual platform, so even these small details matter. Move your boards around, re-name them and give them eye-catching cover images. This way, as soon as someone lands on your Pinterest profile they will know exactly what to expect.

Join Pinterest For Business

One of the main benefits of joining Pinterest for business is gaining the access to Pinterest Analytics. This is a key feature if you are hoping to utilise Pinterest for your brand. Pinterest Analytics will give you access to data such as what exactly is being re-pinned from your website, how many people are re-pinning your images and it also allows you to discover the various interests that your particular audience has. Having access to this kind of insightful information allows you to refine your content and produce more of what your readers will enjoy and share.

Pin Directly From Your Website

It’s easy to integrate a Pin-It button onto your website, so why not? Generally, the human race is quite lazy, lets face it. So if you make it as easy as possible for users to pin a picture from your website/post – you’ll greatly increase the chances of that actually happening.

Promote, Promote, Promote!

If you want your targeted audience to actually find your Pinterest profile, direct them to it from your other social media sites. Even include a link to your Pinterest profile from your website itself. Make sure people are aware that your Pinterest actually exists!

You can do this for small business, however, you can also use these same features for your wedding, house inspirations, create a website around your wedding, such as Paul and Ciara’s wedding or even around your hobby. You can then add Pin-It button onto your website!

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5 Tools For Social Media Marketing Your Small Business

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Staying on top of all of your social media profiles can sometimes prove to be difficult.

Thankfully, there are plenty of social media tools out there to make everything much easier. The reason any small business should implement a social media strategy is simple – to drive traffic to their business website. From scheduling posts, to gaining insights into your audience and more: here are 5 tools for social media marketing.

1. Analytics

Analytics is available in many shapes and sizes across a variation of social media platforms, for example – Facebook insights, Google Analytics and Twitter Analytics. When used appropriately, analytics can be a goldmine of information allowing you to see what is working in your marketing and where you have room to improve – which is undeniably important for a small business growing their online audience.

You will be able to see yearly, monthly, weekly and even daily summaries (varying across each platform) allowing you to draw up comparisons across any given periods. Analyzing this data allows you to experiment on your social media marketing techniques – particularly in the beginning, it’s all about trial and error and finding out what works for you and your brand. Paying attention to analytics is the best way to know first hand whether your marketing is working.

2. Buffer

Buffer is a content publishing platform, letting you publish and schedule content to your social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and recently, Pinterest. Being able to schedule your social media content saves you from worrying about being on hand all day to publish content when you can be getting on with other tasks.

Buffer also features analytics for each of your individual scheduled tweets. This allows you to monitor how well your scheduling strategy is doing, as you will be able to see how many users viewed the tweet at that set time of the day, how many favourited the tweet, how many retweeted, how many replied and how many clicked on any links that may have been included – so you can keep a close eye on it and experiment with your scheduling to see what kind of strategy works best for you.

3. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a fantastic way to stay on top of all of the activity going on on Twitter. Twitter is a very fast paced social media platform and information can be easily missed on your feed – it’s sometimes near impossible to keep up with it all. TweetDeck allows you to catch all of the activity in one place. You can make individual columns for your general feed, your mentions, lists and more. This tool is particularly useful if you are monitoring hashtags – such as hashtags relevant to your brand or Twitter chat hashtags.

4. Canva and PicMonkey

Canva and PicMonkey are the perfect tools to use for creating eye-catching images and micro-content to publish to your social media profiles. Visual posts generally receive a higher level of engagement – as much as 18% for click-through rates, 89% more favourites and 150% more retweets – so with these two tools combined you can effortlessly put together your own visually appealing images that speak to your brand. Both tools are user-friednly and easy to navigate. With Canva having set dimensions for Twitter, Facebook ads and more, as well as pre-made text formats, it’s pretty quick when you get the hang of it.

PicMonkey gives you all of the features you need for editing images without the complicated layouts. It essentially removes the need for a small business to make the investment in Photoshop.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is the perfect brainstorming tool for when you are thinking of creating content for your brand. The most challenging thing with creating content is trying to work out what kind of content your audience perceives as valuable and how you can go about creating it for your own brand. BuzzSumo allows you to analyze the best performing content for any niche. You can search for the topic you want to create content around and see whether these topics interest your audience, as it shows you sharing stats across different social media platforms. This will also allow you to identify what kind of content does best on which platform – so you will have a good idea of where your focus should be.

Reviews

As well as social media is it good to show potential customer that you are trust worthy, a good way to do with is collect reviews. You can do with Facebook if you are a local business or with platforms like TrustPlot. Uni Baggage our sister company collects reviews regularly and it now has over 2,000. This helps buyers trust you especially when ordering online.

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New to Irish Parcels? Find out how we can help you save up to 80% on your parcel deliveries.

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