Social media is a great way for small businesses to reach and engage with their customers efficiently and effectively. But we know you are busy running your business and delighting customers around this holiday season, which is why we’ve done the hard yards for you and wrapped up some of the most useful social media tools with latest feature launches in 2017.
Below are some features launched recently and how you can use them to your advantage.
LinkedIn website demographics
LinkedIn’s newly launched website demographics reporting tool, allows you to see the type of professionals visiting your website and filter the information by categories such as job title, industry, company, location and country.
The tool helps your small business to engage with audiences and get the chance to learn a thing or two more about your customer base. For example, if you are a retailer traditionally marketing your briefcases to an older male audience – perhaps you’ll discover a young female audience is visiting your site more frequently, giving you the chance to refine and optimise your advertising efforts to reach a new audience.
Snapchat paperclips
With four million daily active Australian users, Snapchat offers a fun, interactive way to connect with young consumers. Its newest update, paperclips, is a huge bonus for brands, allowing you to attach a website or link to your snap so people can simply swipe up to view it. This streamlines the path to purchase, giving you the ability to push customers straight to a product or service as they view it.
Facebook six-second videos
First it was 30, then 15. Now six-second video ads are launching on the popular social network. With people’s attention span sitting at around three seconds, and their patience to wait for a video to load at two seconds, the six-second time frame seems about right to capture the interest of multi-tasking and multi-screening consumers.
This new feature helps to level the playing field for SMEs, where they can battle out with larger companies with deep pockets, based on short creative videos versus big production budgets for longer ones.
Snap Map
The recently introduced Snap Map feature lets users pull up a map that shows where stories that are being posted locally and around the world.
For example, local businesses could pay to be visible on an app’s map when they’re in the vicinity, significantly boosting foot traffic, especially for a local restaurant or store, by luring them with tempting pictures. The theory is backed by The Consumer Barometer Survey 2014-15 Australia, stating 95 per cent of smartphone users have used their phone to look up local information and 59 per cent visited the searched place.
Peer Benchmarking
LinkedIn Premium Insights, already a “go-to platform” for many SMEs, has recently added a new feature called “peer benchmarking” which allows companies to easily compare their data with other companies and be in line with their industry peers to better understand their competitive standing and keep tabs on industry trends. SMEs can now compare companies across insights like total employee count and job openings.
Snapchat’s context cards
Snapchat is on top of its marketing game with the new “Context Cards”, which provide additional info about Snaps shared by users such as restaurant reviews and reservations, Uber and Lyft ride hailing, contact information and more.
If you’re new to the world of social-media marketing and want to know more about how your business can benefit from these platforms, there are many free and easy-to-follow social media guides on the internet that you can download.
Tara Commerford, Vice President and Managing Director Australia & New Zealand, GoDaddy
