How to Use Social Media to Prove your Industry Expertise
Use your social media channels to prove your industry expertise.
Why should I buy from you?
The answer to this question is one business owners sometimes have trouble articulating. Yet, to be successful in business, it’s a necessity to share your unique value proposition. Keep in mind that most consumers conduct extensive research before approaching a company. Make sure the information they find on your digital channels is sufficiently demonstrating your expertise.
Here are key ways to share your expertise using social media.
Think of LinkedIn as a business meeting or networking event. When someone clicks on your LinkedIn profile, what do they see? Hopefully, they find a complete and robust profile that shares your career story. Use your personal LinkedIn profile to provide examples of your work.
- Share the summary of a case study using SlideShare.
- Demonstrate your leadership and teamwork by sharing about important projects. Remember to link to other project team members.
- Use the LinkedIn Recommendations to demonstrate your leadership skills and industry expertise. Do others turn to you for information? Ask them to share about the experience in a LinkedIn recommendation. Solicit recommendations from people who can share your story. Ask clients to share how you helped them.
- Share free resources to support your industry colleagues. There’s no better way to demonstrate your expertise than to show you are the one who provides information to your industry peers. Create a tool or resource showing how to solve some of your industry’s greatest problems using your methodologies.
Important note: LinkedIn company pages are going away. Don’t lose all that valuable information. Here’s a great article by Reed Write Marketing. Use the new LinkedIn showcase pages to target your audience and show why you are different from your competition.
Podcast
Think of a Podcast as a prominent business talk show. While it’s important for the program to be entertaining, it’s more important to provide value. Podcasts can be a demonstration of your social value. Use this platform to show who you are connected to and share your thought leadership skills.
- Interview industry leaders. Every industry has its challenges and many people address challenges in different ways. While we may be in competition with other businesses in our industry, we are in many ways working together.
- Interview your clients. Have you helped a client solve a problem? Schedule an interview and let them share how your business helped solve the problem.
Think of Facebook as your living room. What kind of information would you share if a friend came over and visited with you? Chances are you would pull out pictures of a recent event and share a story. You might even show them a few short videos from the event. This is the same mindset to use when sharing your expertise through your business Facebook page.
- Share employee stories through a photo album to humanize the brand.
- Are your employees doing volunteer work in the community? Share about it.
- Do you have an amazing company culture? Share what works through a photo album or candid employee interviews.
- Take your audience behind the scenes of product development.
- Interview employees on the job using simple smartphone technology and share the videos on Facebook.
YouTube
Video is one of the most effective and powerful marketing tools. YouTube receives billions of views each month with users searching for answers. Position yourself as the industry resource with creative use of videos.
- Create short videos for your customers’ frequently asked questions.
- Post videos of employee interviews and industry leader interviews.
- Create demonstration videos that show specifically how to use and benefit from your products and services.
Video Maker & Your Business Blog
Lumen 5 Video Maker is a bonus find for us and it’s an incredibly effective tool to demonstate your expertise. If a business blog is a part of your marketing (and it should be), Lumen 5 takes your ordinary blog post and turns it into a captivating, sharable video. All you do is type in the link to your blog post and with a few clicks, you have a gorgeous video with eye-catching imagery and text. Share it across your social posts, host it on your website, or send it to prospects in an email campaign. The possibilities are endless.
The key messages in our small business marketing plan must communicate our value and expertise to our clients. The real talent lies with being able to do this in a genuine and demonstrative way.
I didn’t forget about Google+. We have a feature story coming up next week. But in the mean time, what questions do you have? Let’s meet up in the comments.
