Edwin Oko Lamptey – Communication Executive, Step Up Business School

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are some of the top social media channels that businesses can leverage to grow their online presence. You try as much as possible to have social media handles on these platforms and the trick is, you don’t need to have different names for the handles. You should ensure that all your handles bare the same name, that way, it gives your brand some sort of visibility for people to easily find your handle when looking for you.

These social media handles or platforms are free to sign up to, you don’t need to pay for registration fee or anything.

The best thing to do is to ensure that, you have very good pictures showing your business.

Also, don’t always yearn to share what you don’t have but share what you have. If you are selling a shoe and the shoe color is blue, don’t share a shoe that has black color, when customers come to you and ask for the blue shoes you showed and you don’t have it in stock, your credibility will be affected. People will not come to you because they will feel like you are either trying to scam them or you are trying to buy time when they need it instantly.

You have to be very social on your social media platforms, that’s why it called social media. If you are not social, you can’t grow your business on social media.

Be interactive. Last week I did a research on how small business interacts with their customers, so I went around town and jotted a number of small businesses like photography, food business, and clothing line. I came back and went to their Instagram pages and sent them messages asking for their price rate or form of information, to my surprise, I haven’t received a single reply from any of them not even one, so if you can’t interact with a potential customer or existing customers how do you expect to make sales?

You have to make sure you are responding to queries as soon as possible. If you can’t respond immediately, there are systems you can use on social media platforms to tell your clients “we are not available, we are going to be available soon”, if you don’t have this activated, you have to do them or else you are going to lose a lot of customers, you will think that social media is not helping but it the number one booster of businesses currently in this time.