INBOUND ACCELERATOR

It isn’t always easy to keep a steady stream of content flowing to market your business. That holds true for large corporations, start-ups, SMBs, non-profits and every other iteration of commerce trying to use social media and digital content today.

The content machine is insatiable.

How much time can you commit to your social media marketing and public relations efforts each day and each week?

Whether you spent hours one day gathering up all the essential information and images to create your business or brand’s Facebook page, or slowly pieced it together bit by bit as you developed a strategy and routine, if it has been in place for more than a year, chances are its time to do a review.

We’d all love to create that piece of content that lights up the metrics meters on our website’s dashboard or Facebook Insights — comments, shares, clicks! But we know that the majority of content created today won’t hit that huge payoff. But what kind of content does?

Facebook is an essential part of any small business’s marketing strategy today — after all, nearly 8 in 10 American adults use the platform, and as many as 74 percent of purchases are influenced by social media.

Is your small business on Facebook already? How confident are you that you’ve set up your page in a way that puts your best foot (or should that be face?) forward?

When we asked healthcare providers about their most successful social media channel, more than half pointed to Facebook, likely due to its position as the social media platform that reaches the most American consumers of all ages.

Your social media posts are written to engage followers and hopefully link them back to your website. But the true power is not simply in your original posts (which may only be seen by a small percentage of followers), but when those posts are shared.

Here are a few stats to chew on for a minute:

• Facebook users view more than 8 billion videos every day.

• One in five Facbook videos is now a live broadcast.

• By 2020, over 75 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video.

Now a question: Is your business’s Facebook page a part of this future?

If not, do you have plans for joining the crowd? Sadly, if you don’t, you may be left behind.

If you’ve taken the time to create a great social media image — whether it is a beautiful photo of your facility or a meme meant to make your followers stop and think (or giggle) — the last thing you want to have happen is for parts of the image to be hidden when it is displayed in your followers’ news feeds.

When you share your business Facebook page with someone, what does the URL look like?

Is it a random jumble of letters and numbers, which may have been assigned by the platform when you first created your page, or is it clear that this Facebook page belongs to you?