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Social media for microbusiness promotion
Social media can reduce the cost of microbusiness promotion online. And if you want to promote your craft microbusiness online, you need to master more than one social media channel.
Why?
Social media is a powerful tool, provoking attention, causing reactions, alerting on new releases or on novelty items, but also serving the purpose of tracking market trends or behaviours – of individuals and groups. Social media is nowadays more often used for increasing user generated content.
Although the first was Facebook and although it was designed for university students, now there are other similar platforms that are willingly chosen, also to support microbusiness activities. The choice of social media channels for business purposes will depend on the type of business operation. Instagram or Pinterest are recommended for more “visual sectors” (art, furniture, culinary), while YouTube if you will be sharing video demonstrations of your product (product assembly) or live streaming an event, for example. The most professional social media channel is LinkedIn. It is also useful in job seeking – information included in your profile will be viewed by potential employers and yourself you can search the job offers on the platform to directly apply for the job. Twitter is for short messages with up to 280 characters. While Facebook remains to be quite universal, both for business and personal profiles.
Further comparing social media channels…
Facebook has the most active users than any other SM platform.
Instagram is photo based; a more visual SM compared to Facebook.
Pinterest is another visual SM platform, but not only for showcasing products, but selling & buying, inspiration for e-commerce for the creative sector.
TikTok, used mostly on smartphones and most downloadable app in 2020, is a SM for gaining awareness, either product, service or achievement. It can also be a channel for trend alerting.
And have you heard about the Dots?
The Dots is a LinkedIn for creatives. You can connect with other creatives and search for collaborators, apart from showcasing your work, which it can also do
What is more social media is creating new potential for craft microbusiness, by:
- selling for building e-commerce,
- adding value to reveal the hidden stories behind the craft object and its maker,
- building audiences and
- networking to share information and resources and promote creative, collaborative opportunities.
Convinced?
If your answer is YES, then you should start thinking about your social media strategy.
Start from choosing the social media platform you want to focus us, so you can learn how it works and use it effectively. Ask yourself a few questions: who is your target audience? What channels are used by your clients? What do you want to get out of the social presence for your craft microbusiness? How much time can you devote to manage the SM?
When you make your choice, learn how to use the channel, decide on additional tools you can use to save your time, e.g., scheduling posts.
Moreover, to link your work or ideas with others, create associations, start using #hashtags – in this way you will be generating leads. Hashtags will consociate similar products (#pottery), services (#moulding), events (#craftevent), professions, and support networking with others to share and exchange experience or create mutual initiatives to promote craft microbusinesses. A tool that will help you with this is Hashtagify.
Go to module 7 ‘Branding’ to find out about a ‘Smart Pinterest Strategy’, Tik Tok for creative microbusiness, Facebook Ad Success and showcasing your brand on Instagram.
Now, if you have a social media strategy you need to know how to analyse data collected through social media. The simplest activities are observing received likes, comments, shares and saves, but the next step is monitoring mentions and discussions of your craft work. In other words, you will be tracking engagement. Google Analytics will also be a valuable support to see how much traffic to your website comes from your social media channels.
To set up Google Analytics you only need a Google Account. A good idea will be to have a separate account for your microbusiness, which will make it easier to track page visitor data. An additional asset is that you can also collect data from mobile apps, under the condition you choose this feature. Once you are on the Google Analytics page, sign in and choose the Analytics feature providing basic information about your website, finally clicking the command Get Tracking. At this point you will see your Tracking ID, which you need to install on your website to start gathering data and presenting them in the form of a report. There are a few ways to do this. If your website is built on WordPress, then install the plugin by WordPress under the name Google Analytics by Monster Insights. In the Settings screen you need to perform authentication to receive a new code. Don’t forget to confirm the website URL you will be tracking in case you are managing a few websites under the same Google account.
But if you are not using WordPress, after logging in to your Google Analytics account go to the ADMIN screen. There you will verify the website URL and in Tracking Info you will have a Tracking Code, which must be placed in your website’s php. Once this is done you can send test traffic command to finalize the set-up.
To understand customer behaviour, you can also choose to use HubSpot, a marketing automation platform. It can be integrated with Shopify, for example.
While to find out if others mention you in their blogs or articles, write about you in publications or information about your work is shared online, you can also set up Google Alerts.