What is the value of social media to small businesses? We don’t have a statistic nationally or globally- but we can give you a figure for how our small business is profiting from social media:

Around 45% of our new business last month came directly from our social media presence.

We at Talbot Jones Risk Solutions are by no means experts in marketing. We have a lot to learn and lots of ideas we’ve yet to explore and attempt. But we’re keen to encourage other small and medium businesses to get online and get active as a very affordable and effective way to meet, engage and cement relationships with clients.

Here are some of our tips:

  • Remember it’s social media. You’d never just march into a crowded room and just start shouting loudly about yourself and why everyone should buy from you, would you?! That would really put people off approaching you. So what would you do? You’d probably introduce yourself to a small group and find out more about them first. Then, you might tell them a bit about what you do, and answer any questions and help them solve any problems within your area of expertise. After that, they may well come to you, with questions about buying your goods or services. The same goes for social media.
  • Don’t just try to push your product or service down people’s throats. Introduce yourself to others, find out about your audience, get to know them; support them, promote them, encourage them, engage with them, interact with them, advise them, help them and connect them.

 

  • Analyse. Use analytics tools from Google and on your social media accounts to see what interests, engages and informs your audience. Who is your audience? Where do they live? How old are they? What are their interests? What engages people in your brand? What sends people to your website? What gets people talking? What shows you to be an expert in your field?
  • We have approximately 10 times more Twitter followers than Facebook followers. A few months ago I noticed that although I was working very hard and spending a lot of time on Twitter, without much focus on Facebook, the latter represented 54% of social media traffic to our website. Titter trailed behind. So, we wondered if our time would be better invested in engaging on Facebook, despite our smaller following. We made some changes … and, last month, 95% of our social media traffic came from Facebook! Our engagement and number of queries has peaked dramatically. Having learned some valuable social media lessons over the last 2 or 3 months,  we now using that data to again adapt our online strategy, to try to maintain our successes on Facebook, while improving our efforts on our other platforms.
  • Analyse. Identify. Adapt!

 

  • Be flexible. Try new things. Try new platforms, different types of content, different calls to action, different groups…Talk to people and listen to their suggestions. Give them a try before discounting them.
  • We initially stayed away from Facebook as we thought there wouldn’t be an interest in our services there. It turns out we were wrong! I shied away from LinkedIn because I found it intimidating. But LinkedIn is where are target market primarily are, so I’ve had to face my fear and discomfort, as I try to makes inroads there.

 

  • Be consistent. Be patient. Trust and strong relationships don’t come overnight. Use social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite to regularly share value adding content. But get on your platforms live at least once a day to answer questions, share ideas, thank people sincerely, ask questions, connect people, tag people and recommend people. It creates and promotes a lovely culture, that also has the benefit of being good for your business.
  • For a full year, we posted faithfully and consistently on social media. We introduced ourselves, chatted, retweeted, tagged, shared, listened and blogged. We gained new leads weekly from social media, but we worked very hard for them. 12 full months after launching our business and engaging faithfully on social media, people finally started liking, sharing, commenting, inviting, tagging and recommending us on social media in much greater numbers. Every day, now, we get at least one direct query via social media from some we have not previously engaged wit. Thanks to the support and engagement of others, people are beginning to trust and respect our small-business brand, without even meeting us.

 

If you still feel daunted or would value some training, mentoring or accountability, we recommend that you get in touch with a social media training company such as Digital Sparkles. They often have the opportunity to offer funded training, however if it’s not available, we would certainly recommend investing in some sessions- the potential Return On Investment makes it more than worthwhile.

If you are a supporter of small businesses, check out our other articles on 6 reasons you should support local and 7 reasons how you can do so practically.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

Talbot Jones Risk Solutions is an insurance brokerage specialising in Charity and SME insurance. Get in touch if you’d value a free insurance review, advice or quotation and we’ll be more than happy to help.

Photo Credit: HowToStartABlogOnline.net