How Should Niche Businesses Use Social Media to Best Effect?

This article gives suggestions and best practice tips to niche businesses around capitalizing on the potential of social media.

Time to Socialise

The big mistake that many smaller niche businesses make is to forsake social media platforms completely. There is a prevailing attitude that, because only a few people will probably be seeking out a social media presence, that there isn’t any point in doing it.

Instead, these businesses should view social media in much the same way that they view search engine optimisation. Accept that yes, fewer people will be seeking you out, however take that opportunity to focus on the specific market that has an interest in you and make your social media content as relevant as possible.

How to Stand Out

If you are a niche business then it is not easy to stand out in a world where the biggest
businesses use social marketing experts and have large budgets in order to make themselves successful in this manner.

Where several of these bigger businesses fall down, however, is that their content is just boring. Yes, it may be relevant and original, but it doesn’t inspire, and generally leads back to their site and the same old boring landing page.

Visual social media is a particularly powerful tool, especially if you are selling a product that someone would want to see in action before buying it. This may be something as simple as a fireworks display, or as expensive as a luxury car. Of course, the traditional text based platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Digg are still worth exploring, however if your business can make the most of visual media you will gain much more attention.

Case Study

Just by looking at the ways in which a fireworks vendor could potentially market themselves using social media, the possibilities are endless.

The most obvious means is to use YouTube to utilise demonstration videos of said firework in action. Saying what it does is all well and good, but if a picture can paint a thousand words then how powerful is a video?

There is also endless potential in the uses of sites such as Pinterest or Instagram. Any business with a visual slant can encourage their followers to share inspirational photographs, or even create ones of their own products and what they would like to see your brand produce. Simple competitions such as “come up with a name for this new product” or “what would you like to see?” are excellent ways to pique interest online and build a social media following.

Smaller niche businesses using social media can often quickly build themselves a kind of “cult” following, which is then an excellent platform on which to expand their reach and business.

original: SociablWeb

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