Wouldn’t you expect any organization that’s affiliated with the Small Business Administration to know its stuff? SCORE, the country’s biggest network of volunteer business experts, certainly does. Since its inception in 1964, SCORE has assisted over 11 million entrepreneurs through activities like mentoring and hosting workshops.
To help aspiring business owners realize their dreams, SCORE conducts research to stay on top of business trends. One trend that’s only been growing in recent years is businesses using social media for the purposes of sales, marketing, and customer service.
According to research conducted by SCORE, nearly 70 percent of adults in the United States use at least one social media platform regularly, a number that’s up from just 11 percent in 2006. SCORE reports that YouTube is the most popular social media site across three generations with Facebook coming in second.
SCORE’s research shows that about 77 percent of small businesses in the U.S. use social media for business purposes. Driving revenue, increasing brand awareness, capturing leads, and providing customer service are just a few of the reasons so many businesses use social media.
With millions of people using social media every month in the United States and billions doing the same around the world, you may be eager to start using social platforms to promote your business. To do that successfully, however, you have to figure out how you can make your social pages stand out from the countless number of competing social pages operated by other businesses.
How can you do that? You can use videos to leverage your social media presence.
Identify the Appropriate Social Sites for Your Social Media Video
Some organizations are so excited to promote themselves on social media that they make the mistake of setting up too many social pages. You don’t need to be omnipresent to use social media effectively. In fact, if you can’t keep up with all the social accounts you have, they may end up working against you.
To prevent that from happening, you need to identify the social platforms that are the most appropriate for you. Since you want to use social media video to enhance your presence, finding the platforms you should use basically comes down to two things. You need to find the social channels the members of your target audience use most frequently and determine which of those support videos the best.
Use a Social Listening Tool to Keep Your Video Production Focused
Once you’ve identified the social channels you’re going to use to share your videos, it’s time to set things up so that your video production will focus on topics that are directly relevant to the people who’ll view the videos you produce. Today, it’s not enough to simply produce high-quality videos. Consumers now want to see videos that are meaningful to them, meaning they want to consume personalized content.
Luckily, there are tools you can use to ensure you’re producing videos that are truly meaningful to the members of your target audience. Social listening tools like Sentione enable you to monitor activity on social media and across the Internet. This ability will allow you to identify the topics your target audience is talking about and the subjects they want to know more about.
A social listening tool will also enable you to monitor what your competitors are doing online. This can give you a competitive advantage if you can identify topics your competitors haven’t discussed yet or subjects you can discuss with more authority.
Consider Using Dynamic Videos
It’s a well-known fact that most people will watch a video instead of reading text if both are available for them to consume about the same topic. With an ever-growing number of consumers wanting – and expecting – personalized content, it’s advisable for you to seek out platforms that enable you to deliver the types of videos the members of your target audience are actively looking for.
To help businesses target people who are most likely to respond to certain videos, Facebook launched Dynamic Ads. By using this platform, you can deliver personalized messages through your videos.
To get the most out of using dynamic videos, you need to fine-tune your targeting abilities. You can do this by collecting data about your target audience that you can then use to segment your audience into well-defined groups who will respond positively to the videos you make for each group.
How can you collect data that will allow you to segment your target audience into specific groups that share characteristics and interests? By using one or more social listening tools, of course.
Ask Your Employees to Share Your Social Videos
While influencer marketing isn’t new, the rise of micro-influencers is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s also one you may want to consider if you plan to use videos to leverage your presence on social media.
In general, micro-influencers have fiercely loyal followers who are usually swayed by what the influencer has to say. While a given micro-influencer may have a significantly smaller following than a macro-influencer, their messages often have more impact because of their followers’ devout loyalty.
Just like a micro-influencer will likely have loyal followers, it’s likely that your employees have highly engaged followers of their own. If you don’t want to employ the help of a micro-influencer or one simply doesn’t exist for your niche, consider asking your employees to share your videos on their personal social pages.
If you’re going to have your employees share your videos, it’s vital that you establish guidelines for them to follow so that their messages are aligned with your brand image and voice. You must also provide motivation for them to share your content and ensure your videos are easy for your employees to access and share.
Get the Ball – Rather the Camera – Rolling with Our Miami Video Production Company
If you’re eager to use social media video to enhance your digital presence, you should use our Miami-based video production services to make your videos stand out from your competitors’ clips. Our team of experienced directors and cinematographers can make the vision you have for your social videos a reality, and we can ensure your videos hit all the right notes with your target audience.Contact MU2 Productions to learn more about our video production services in Miami today.
