Social Media is a huge part of today’s life. Everything happens on social media. Good things and very bad things too. So, when it comes to translation, social medial also plays an important role in marketing and publicity. Marketing on social media can be much more effective than any other medium.
Why social media?
People live on social media today. They use it for everything from reading news that, unfortunately, aren’t always true, to contact friends and search for things. So, if people are searching for things on social media, it is important they find what they are looking for. Therefore, it is important to have a presence on social media, so possible clients know about us and about our business.
Choosing the right platform
Social media may be an important marketing tool, but we need to know how to use it. In my opinion, just having a presence in all social media platforms may not have the best results. This was something I’ve learnt in an amazing webinar I’ve done last year. First, we need to know our target and make a profile of the clients we want to get, then we choose the best social media platform to reach our target.
In my study, I found that, for Updated Words, Facebook and LinkedIn were the best options.
Lots of businesses advertise on Facebook. I know a case of a company that invested a significant amount of money in newspaper ads with no results, and with a simple free post on Facebook, had a huge influx of orders, and customers through the door. I believe, for them, is the best advertising.
However, Updated Words is quite different. They sell products, we sell services. We cannot post about a “new service arriving in the store tomorrow” like they advertise their new arrivals. So, our marketing on social media needs to be done differently. Therefore, Facebook may not give us the same results. Although, I believe it is important to have a presence in the platform. For Updated Words, Facebook will expose us to a broader community. There we may reach possible private clients who may need documents translated.
In my opinion, LinkedIn is the best platform for business. It is a professional platform, therefore it removes all the unimportant things other platforms, like Facebook, may have. You don’t go on LinkedIn searching for goats or cats, you go on LinkedIn to find jobs, employees, companies, services. So, this is the right platform for a business to be in.
For Updated Words, it is the place to get exposed to possible corporate clients. It also gives us the chance to be linked to companies we work with or have worked with, in the past.
Other platforms
Some colleagues have a presence in other platforms like Instagram or Twitter. It all depends on the type of work they do and the exposure they want to achieve. Each platform would expose them to a certain target, so it is important to define your target in order to choose the platforms you may want to be in.
How to do marketing on social media
Since each platform caters for a specialised audience, your content should be chosen in accordance with that audience. Writing the right content, may keep readers interested and ultimately bring you, clients. At Updated Words, we also studied our audiences and we chose the best content to publish in each social media platform. For Facebook, we may publish or share articles about general and certified translation and more generalized content. For LinkedIn, we usually share our articles about our work or our views on issues related to our industry.
Ultimately, our aim is to reach possible clients and show them our work.
Cátia