By David Gutierrez.
A huge proportion of brand promotion is now done online, particularly through social media. Digital ad spending exceeded TV promotion budgets for the first time ever in 2017.
Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels and Dubai Sims
Regardless of what kind of business you run, you’re expected to have a strong online presence—and that is doubly true for web development businesses. If you create online solutions for your clients but have poorly designed and managed social media accounts, it doesn’t make a great impression.
So what can you do to avoid being a shoeless shoemaker?
1. Run Contests
Contests are useful for several reasons. They help you engage with your audience in a fun and casual way. They allow you to give back to your community. They give you access to user-generated content that can be used to promote your brand further.
Some contests require minimal input from users (e.g., participants have to like a particular post to get a chance of winning); others motivate them to provide extra information that can be further used in your lead funnel. Just make sure the prizes are consistent with the effort expected from a user—e.g., a free website redesign offer can create a lot of buzz, but you should have a huge audience for it to pay off.
2. Use Consistent Branding Assets Across Social Media
If you do your promotion through several channels (and you should), make sure the assets you use are consistent on all of them—any visitor should immediately understand it’s your brand the moment they open your account. Use an identically formatted logo, the same color scheme and, if possible—photos of the same size, as it creates a sense of uniformity and balance.
This should spill over to everything else you do: if you have an app or your own website builder they should be designed in the same recognizable style as everything else related to your business.
3. Treat Your Profiles Very Seriously
Whenever you write an account description or a bio, you should make it clear who you are and what you do in as few words as possible. First, you have a character limit. Second, visitors want to see the information immediately; if you force them to scan through a lot of introductory text first, they may lose interest. Do a bit of research with an SEO tool like SEMRush to identify the best keywords to use in your bio. Just make sure they truly are relevant, because there is nothing worse than a keyword-heavy mess in an account description.
4. Share Original Content
We’ve all been hearing “content is king” for years now, but it is not sufficient simply to create original content to generate leads. You need to efficiently share it—and that means using social media. The more content you generate, the more social sharing you do, which creates a consistent online presence and drives traffic to your search-optimized pages, improving your search engine rankings and traffic.
As web development is a visually-charged business, consider using YouTube. Optimizing YouTube clips for SEO can drive a lot of valuable traffic and help you answer common questions from your audience.
5. Use Social Proof
If you get a good review from your customer, make sure to publish it across all your channels, preferably with links leading back to the client’s website. A long and detailed review creates a much more powerful impression than a simple, impersonal 1 to 5 rating.
You don’t need extensive preparation and huge upfront expenses to begin implementing these tips right now. So don’t wait any longer—start forging a powerful online brand presence today!
David Gutierrez started his career as a web designer in 2005. In 2012 he founded a creative design agency. Now it serves clients all over the world across multiple industries with a specific focus on FMCG and Fin-Tech.
Nice article! Social media is the great tool for all type of business. Branding can be easier through social media. As you said content is very important and it should be original for better sharing on all social media platforms.
So true Vikram, social media is all that.