This is about community building… In the physical world, if you want to uplift your image, project your professional acumen, make your brand prominent or establish your leadership position in a sector, normally you speak in trade chamber meetings; sponsor events in a social club; get other members in the social clubs talking about you. In a similar manner, social media platforms can be leveraged to establish your brand credibility / reputation. You can speak out from these platforms (which have a far bigger reach than any social club) to fulfil the similar objectives However, to make the best use of Social Media, you need to decide what your goal is (in terms of what you want from it) i.e. whether you want to bring them onto your website; Increase Brand awareness or increase your sales. This helps you create the content (posts or reels) which will make your target do what you want. Of course, the goals also depend on the nature of your business (i.e., Business to Business (B2B) OR Business to Customer (B2C) segment). For example, a B2B business like Software service provider would like to establish its thought leadership & authority on the subject and would look for leads; while a B2C business like a Branded Mattress / Pillow would like to spread Brand awareness or look for sales conversion However, creating the right kind of content is also not enough. To get the best results from your campaigns you need to leverage social media, which simply means multiplying your efforts by collaborating with other active people (who have their own large following viz., Influencers, complementing businesses etc) on these social platforms. For example, Hotels use Travel vloggers with a good number of followers, to promote their brand and Fitness equipment Brands use fitness icons to promote theirs’ (basically you put your goods on someone else’s conveyor belt) To add to this, there are other brilliant tools available today, like ‘WhatsApp for Business’. They can help small businesses succeed by enabling easy despatch of e-catalogues, automated messages as well as handling of payments etc. to their database. Thus, even the smallest of businesses are able to organize and market themselves without spending much. Done well, this can be your ticket to Status & Fame (Rutba & Shohrat)
