Growing your company’s stock is the root motivation for all business decisions. Driving up your profit margins by expanding and engaging your customer base through social media is one of the newest and most effective ways to grow your stock.
If you want sustained growth, you need to have an employee who is active and engaged with followers on behalf of your brand. Even largely successful companies like Apple struggle with top level-strategies and brand perception. Being an effective CEO comes with its share of challenges, and social media strategy is no exception. By tracking your stock, you can start to determine if your social media efforts are providing a sufficient return.
The following six ways can help you grow your company’s stock on social media.
On most social platforms, you can include multiple hashtags with your posts. Always include some relevant generic tags like #onlinesale, as well as branded tags that people can search for if they want posts from your company. Not only will creating quality tags help potential customers find and learn about your company, but they’ll also follow you in the future, which can lead to substantial brand growth. The best brands know this and create promotions around hashtags. People will then see and search for these tags in the future.
Users of social networks always want to share amazing offers. If you’re offering great coupons, followers will share them with their friends who will, in turn, keep sharing them. An example of this in action was the Thresher coupon debacle of 2006. Thresher released a 40 percent off coupons on wine and champagne that went viral on social media sites just before Christmas and led to more than $800,000 in sales, as well as many new customers and followers.
Image via Flickr by mkhmarketing
When you post content on most social media sites, it has a fairly short lifespan. Pinterest is interesting in that content can continue to be re-pinned and viewed for months or years. If you can get a picture spread widely through Pinterest, you’ll increase your customer base and brand recognition for years to come.
Run a contest on Pinterest that gives everyone who re-pins one of your pictures a small coupon and a chance to win a bigger prize. One company you may have heard of that utilizes Pinterest for marketing is a little chain called Starbucks, which has run Pinterest contests in the past.
If you want to get the word out about your latest products or sales, there’s nothing people like more than free things, shipping being a great example. In Dan Ariely’s groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, he explains that people get more excited over getting a small thing for free than saving a larger amount off the price. Free is a magic word when it comes to enticing social sharing and exploding your sales.
Image via Flickr by mkhmarketing
Running a giveaway or contest is a great way to generate buzz around your business, but you need to maximize your return on your investment. One of the best ways to do this is to share the contest on social media, but link the consumer to a page requiring a sign-up in order to enter the contest. They get a free chance at winning something, and you get a new potential customer for your business.
Attracting shares of your content is always a key factor in social media campaign success. Pictures are the most shared content form on any social platform. Include a high-quality picture along with the message you want to get out in order to reach new customers. If you have a product that lends itself well to professional looking pictures, include them.
There are companies of all sizes that are struggling to grow their stocks effectively on social media. However, there are also a small minority of companies that know how to use social media to grow their customer base and presence by using the methods described above and have reaped the rewards.