Using Social Media for Business

nikensmartini February 25, 2019 3 Comments

This post is answering my friend’s question in setting up the social media for selling products. We already know that a lot of people are using social media as the powerful tool to share their daily stories to their connections, sharing their experiences, telling about some information or just do some posting without any purposes. It means that we use the social media as a life diary with the unlimited time and quantity of posting.

How about doing the business in social media? Does it work well?

According the above situation, we can say that the social media is very powerful tool to share any kind of information in unlimited basis to our friends, families, colleagues, business partners or even to any people around the world. But, does it still effective use social media for doing business? Basically, it depends on the business itself. Because, different business use different platforms and styles of language to share the information to target markets. We know that a lot of people use various tools to promote their business, such as the attractive corporate website, creative social media, e-commerce engagement and apply the direct selling method.

I would like to share my story in running my clothing business. Actually, it was the clothing shop for adults, babies and kids. I used the conventional method in selling the products, such participated in various bazaar every Saturday and Sunday by collaborating with some friends. This participation is good for networking purpose and also to do some surveys in the market. So, I get a lot of information about the trend of the clothing and also the tag prices. The bazaar community is very good for protecting us in running the business and they also helped us in raising our business. Beside participating in some bazaars, I used the social media to sell the products, such as Facebook, Instagram and BBM Group. You may check @pocushop instagram and it is my “baby” business. The social media is very useful, especially to build the the interaction with potential customers and it would gain more trust.

Those platforms (Instagram, Facebook and BBM group) and bazaar worked very well at that time and those created revenues and some positive effects for my business. Now, the trend has change and there are a lot of interesting facts happened. In positive way, we have many options of methods in running the business. There are 3 changes (#nikenversion) that can affect our ways in running our business.

What are those changes?

There are a lot of social media popping up in the market current days and those attract most people to engage with social media based on their purposes, which are personal or for business. By knowing the benefit of using social media, a lot of people tend to learn more about the technology and social media usage and the current trend of the social media itself.

YOU WON’T BE AN ALIEN IF YOU KNOW THE SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE TECHNOLOGY WITHIN.

The convenience way exist for selling and buying the products through e-commerce. We can see that potential buyer will find the easiest way to purchase products through online shops with unlimited time and choices. The opposite, the seller is also very easy to set up the online company in the online shop platform.
Most people are able to develop their own website for FREE. It means we can create our website based on our requirements and also without including the third party. The privacy will be handled by ourselves, which is PERFECT!

In this post, I will focus on talking about the use of the social media for business. And I will talk about the website development in my next post.

EVERYBODY LOVES SOCIAL MEDIA

Actually, I do. And I see most of my friends are very active using the social media too. BUT …. in running the business, we can’t 100% depend on the social media. As the e-commerce regulation now tend to be more simple and convenient, people slowly change their business digital platform from social media to the trusted e-commerce platform. The safety reason will be one of the main factors why they do that. And the trust will be built automatically.

Right now, I am doing blogging and vlogging since early 2017. Beside using the website, I post my whole contents in my existing social media, which are Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Facebook. I want to share some ideas that I used to applied in making the engagement in the social media for doing the business with a ZERO COST!

Set up different social media for personal and for business. This is better to separate our connection for business and personal.

Don’t worry, we still can updating the information to our followers from personal account by do some posting in personal social media and link to the business account.

Set the auto-post to social media from Website. If you have the Website as the master platform to post your content, set the auto-post for every content to your social media. By setting up the auto-post, you will cut the time and effort to post the content manually to your social media. So, just click one time and post it to all.

You have to make sure that you select the theme that provide the auto post link to various social media.

Post the content without selling it. It means that even-though you sell the products, but NEVER sell the product in the social media. Why? As mentioned above that people tend to use the trusted e-commerce to buy the product. They will go straight to the selected e-commerce to buy the product after get the information from the social media. Do you get what I mean? People will get the information from any sources and buy from the selected platform.

If you sell the products, you better build your own shop in numbers of trusted e-commerce and use the social media to inform about your products’ benefit. If you sell the content, use the social media to send the information visually and link it to our own website. It will raise the viewer as well.

If you post the picture in your social media, use the photo descriptions that are able to enhance the meaning of the picture itself. If you post the picture of your content, put the photo description that make your picture stronger and persuade people to get to know more about your content by clicking the link. If you post your product that you want to sell, it is better to put the information about the product’s benefits instead of give some words that are not relating to the products.

Make the photo descriptions that connect with the picture.

Post the content regularly. It might be sound thousand times from other articles. But it is very important to post our content regularly but in the same period, such as every Tuesday, every Monday, one post every 2 days, and others.

By posting the content regularly, people will remember us and also our content.

Another important tips is always keep your eye on the social media trend. The changes will be the change. A social media is used to upgrade their system to maximize their performance.

So, always keep your eye on it!

Thanks for reading.