10 Social Media Tactics to Try Now

Whether you’re a new or veteran decorating business, there’s no more wiggle room: You need a social media presence. Besides introducing people to your brand, social media gives you a direct line of communication to your customers, supports your sales and marketing efforts, lets you learn more about your prospects and drives traffic back to your website.

Here are 10 tactics to improve your efforts on social networks - and get your business even more interaction than before.

1. Use a social media management tool. Tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social allow you to generate all the messages you’d like to send to all your profiles and networks in one spot, so that you don’t have to switch between accounts. Plus, depending on what tool you use, you can receive messages and monitor mentions so you can address any customer issues as quickly as possible in real time. These social tools also provide you with data about your current strategy so you can decide what’s working (and not) for the future - for example, you can learn what networks score you the best results, who’s most likely to engage with your content, what types of posts get the most engagement and what keywords get the most clicks.

2. Use social media to boost your SEO. Search engines like Google constantly collect data on which pages score consistent traffic and which pages people ignore. That’s why part of your social strategy should be to drive traffic to your optimized pages - that will cause them to climb way faster. Tip: If you use Facebook’s scheduling tool or a batch scheduler like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, schedule posts that lead back to these pages consistently throughout the month.

3. Engage with your customers - authentically. We’ve all heard that we shouldn’t outright pitch our decorating services on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That’s because 86% of buyers want an authentic and honest brand personality on social networks, according to Sprout Social surveys. However, ask yourself: Am I sharing useful content plus special deals and sales? That’s the sweet spot. Customers want answers to their most pressing questions, along with being entertained, engaged and shown where and how they can score your products and services when they need and want them.

4. Share the love on social. Whether you teamed up with another decorator for a cool project, donated some screen-printed T-shirts to a charity race or helped a client achieve a marketing goal with a killer promotional products campaign, share it and tag them on social media. You’ll get to show off your skills, give other businesses and organizations some publicity, and hopefully get seen via their social channels, too, when they reshare your post on their feeds.
5. Advertise, or boost your posts on social. Take the time to craft some highly targeted ads on the social media networks of your choice based on your customers’ industries and needs. For example, you can target Facebook ads by age, location, education level, industry and behavior on the site, such as what pages they’ve already liked, helping you increase the odds of a conversation. Plus, with Facebook Audience Insights, you can analyze information about your followers, like interests, demographics and behavior.

6. Sometimes, newsjacking’s necessary. Let’s be honest, people love “liking,” commenting on and sharing fun posts that have the potential to go viral. If one of your decorated garments gets worn on a reality show, or a celebrity or influencer shows off one of your products, that’s a mega insta-story that will blow up all over social. Or, if there’s a news story, meme or pop-culture moment that totally resonates with your brand, jump in and engage with the story. This is called newsjacking - the key is to get in on it early and often, rather than later, so you don’t look like just another company jumping on the tail-end of a popular trend.

7. Social media’s where the sales are. Yes, we said that you should first push authentic engagement, but a strong social media presence can increase your sales. Consider that written articles, videos and images are the three most engaging content types on social media, according to Clutch. That means with great content you can nudge customer buying decisions during the sales cycle - including white papers or blogs, answering questions or objections, to offering incentives to buy. Plus, four in 10 sales reps have recently closed two to five deals due to social media, according to HubSpot.

8. Don’t shy away from Facebook Live videos. We watch more than 100 million hours of video content on Facebook daily, the site reports. Plus, while only 20% of people will read the text on a page, 80% will watch a video, according to My SMN. Further, after watching a video, 64% of people are more likely to make a purchase, Forbes reports. In your live videos, you can show people around your showroom, demonstrate your latest screen-printing technique or even show highlights from an industry event.

Remember that the majority of your live stream views will come from the replays. That’s why you should start the livestream with a value statement, or your main point, right up front - that keeps them watching. You can also repackage your Facebook Live video; for example, embed it into an email or newsletter that you send to your list.

9. Social media can be a customer service platform. About 59% of Americans say that customer services via social media has made it easier for them to get their questions answered and issues resolved, according to Lyfe Marketing. That’s why you shouldn’t hesitate to communicate with customers via the sites, and assign a staffer to monitor your post comments and direct messages throughout the day. Social’s also a veritable gold mine of great content-generation ideas - like your customers’ most-asked questions. Plus, if you want to do a quick survey, it’s downright easy to drop a question post or even include a link to a quick survey with a prize incentive to one lucky responder.

10. Create a CEO profile on LinkedIn. Forty percent of LinkedIn’s 562 million members visit the site daily - and is one of the most effective sites to connect and engage with decision-makers. As the head of your decorating firm, you’re the face of your business, so you need to create a compelling LinkedIn profile to build credibility, authority and trust with people who might need your services, or become new partners or referrals.

Cultivating relationships on social is a surefire way to skyrocket your sales and marketing efforts - so jump on the cyber train today.

Ed Levy has more than 25 years of apparel-decorating experience. Levy, who’s director of software technologies for Hirsch Solutions, is an in-demand speaker at trade show and regular contributor to industry magazines.