It's no secret how important social media has become for modern businesses. Facebook and Twitter are some of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal. Pinterest can be another great way to build your business online. Find out How to Use Pinterest for Business.

But how do you best take advantage of these platforms? Here are five tips to increase the value of social media for your business.

Profile Design

Your profile is front and centre of your social media marketing efforts. It's the first thing that people see when they click through to your page. It's important to take time to get it right, with the correct images, designs, and content.

There are two main objectives when crafting the perfect Facebook or Twitter profile. The first is branding. Your profile picture, header image and About/Bio section should come together to really tell the story of your brand. Adding moving elements, such as a video in your header, makes your page really come alive! The second objective is increasing how visible your brand becomes to a relevant audience; the more relevant the search terms that appear on your profile, the more likely people are to find your brand.

Keywords & Hashtags

A great way for people to find you and encourage engagement with your posts is by using keywords and hashtags relevant to your industry. This has a wide range of benefits, increasing the number of people who see your posts.

One of your primary goals with social media should involve Reach. Getting more people to see your posts is a great way to increase brand awareness. Using relevant keywords in both your social media profile and posts makes your brand much more likely to appear in relevant searches. Believe it or not, social media marketing is actually a great way to complement and leverage SEO for your website and your brand, so understanding and using targeted keywords is essential when you're trying to build recognition.

Engagement

The most unique and arguably most important aspect of any social media marketing campaign is engagement. It's also what a lot of businesses get wrong.

Social media is all about getting involved in a global conversation. Or, better yet, starting one yourself. It's really important to engage with what's happening in your industry by sharing interesting articles or posts, retweeting, and commenting on what other people are saying. You should post yourself as well, but it shouldn't be too salesy all the time. You want to maintain a good balance of advertisement and engagement. You'd be surprised how effective a simple question can be in starting an online conversation.

More than anything, good engagement takes time and consistency. At MultiWebMarketing, we dedicate time every day to post interesting content and engage with the news and conversations relevant to each client's industry.

Respond

Building on the engagement, responding to your customers is vital to the success of your social media campaign. Where you're getting direct messages, reviews or comments, it's important to keep on top of the conversation by writing back to your customers.

A simple, friendly "Thank you!" to a 5-star Facebook review can go a long way in keeping an audience engaged and keeping a customer. Similarly, every message you receive could be a potential business enquiry. Facebook actually tracks how likely and how quick you are to reply to messages in your company's inbox and shows this information on your page. The better your response rate, the more likely people are to contact you.

Strategy

No two businesses are the same. Before starting out on social media, it's important to take a step back and think about what you want to achieve with your social media campaigns.

At MultiWebMarketing, our clients are spread over a wide range of industries, each with different services and customers. We create a bespoke social media strategy for each client, based on factors like industry, location and social media objectives. Work out your objectives, put together a strategy for your profile, posts and engagement, and implement your strategy by keeping on top of your profile every day.

Managing your social media accounts is an important process, but a time consuming one. Keeping on top with relevant posts and engagements every day is a necessity, especially when you're first starting out on Facebook or Twitter. At MultiWebMarketing we provide professional, results-focused Social Media Management, making sure our clients get the most out of their social media accounts and increase their online presence.