Promoting your products and/or services both online and offline is a challenge in itself for most businesses.
On social media this act appears harder. Getting the balance between selling and promoting your products and/or services, whilst having an interesting social media platform that attracts an interested audience is something that most companies need assistance with.
At the end of the day your social media platform should be doing two things for you. They are:
- Promoting your brand and its story to your audience and beyond.
- Highlighting your product/s and/or service/s
These two elements allow you to drive traffic into your stores and website, which in turn helps to generate sales and profit.
Businesses need to achieve this so that they can invest time and resources in their marketing efforts, including their social media channels.
Unfortunately, constant ‘buy buy buy’ posts on your social media channels often get ignored after a while by your audience. But you need your audience to interact with your platform enough to convert into customers.
It’s a catch 22.
How to Get out of this Catch 22?
People like to come across interesting content that they can enjoy, and then see your products and/or services on the back of this.
Creating a personality on your social media channel is how you break free of the catch 22 situation that most businesses have found themselves in at sometime or another.
Showcasing personality on social media channels helps you to create a voice for your social media channels. Creating this voice helps people to create a relationship with your social media channel, this makes them more likely to actually engage in your posts and convert into a paying customer.
There are several ways in which you can inject personality into your social media channel and move your platforms way from a ‘buy buy buy’ mentality. They include:
Day in the Life posts
People love seeing behind the scenes photos and stories. If you make something for sale then you are a key type of business that can offer behind the scenes excepts for use on social media channels.
If you don’t make your product, or you don’t have a physical product, then you can offer behind the scenes social posts by focusing on how the product or service in question is delivered to your customer.
Anything that helps people to see the effort and care that goes into your product or service is ideal.
The Person
An easy way to inject personality into your social media channel is by showing you and your personality.
Posting images of yourself hard at work/in situ, allowing people to see exactly who they are buying from helps to break down the virtual wall which makes us anonymous.
Interviewing yourself or members of the team and posting these videos on social media channels will help generate a huge amount of content, they will also allow you to answer many frequently asked questions in a much more direct manner.
The Gimmick
Personality can be injected into your social media channel with the use of a gimmick. They can include a mascot such as a particular object, or even a willing much-loved family pet.
These objects, or family pets, allow you to post content without a ‘buy buy buy’ message whilst being engaging for your audience. The content can often have a fun feel about them which can help to brighten your audience’s day and leave them seeking out their next appearance.
Finding the best fit for your business
When considering the personality that you are going to inject into your social media posts its important to remember your audience and their perception of you and your business.
For example, if you were a law firm who deals with serious life situations then we would not recommend that you post videos of your Friday afternoon office fun on social media. It would not be appropriate in such a professional environment.
However, if you were a jewellery designer with an office dog. Then it would be absolutely fine to show your much loved family member chilling in your office whilst you were hard at work.
Finding the best fit for your business is absolutely critical.
You may even find that the personality that you inject helps in generating sales-focused social media posts as it provides a much-liked voice.
Don’t Forget
Don’t forget seasonality – non-sales posts based on the season is a great way of injecting personality into your social media channels.
In the run up to Christmas if your business is decorating the office, attending a carol concert, collecting for food banks or enjoying an office Christmas meal. Then this is the kind of content that can work on your social media channels.
If that isn’t the perfect excuse for an office Christmas tree, then I don’t know what is.
Published: 11th Oct 2019