Social Media 1As Lexelle continues to expand, it has become increasingly important to engage with customers, prospects, clients and employees by using social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Our communications and marketing team use social media activity on a daily basis – whether it be posting the latest insurance industry news on Twitter or updating our clients about a new product on our LinkedIn and Google + pages.

By using social media, firms such as insurance brokers can interact with existing and prospective customers, reinforce brand messaging, influence customer opinions and provide client services more efficiently.

Here are a few straightforward tips which can be used to help you get the most out of social media.

Helps find new customers and expands your audience

Networks like Facebook and Twitter help small businesses to locate their current customers or seek out potential customers. For example if you want to find out about people talking about insurance in your area, you can create a geographical search in Hootsuite to locate anyone tweeting about the need for an insurance product. After locating those tweeting about insurance, you can start reaching out to them, and asking in more detail about what they want.

Social media helps target audiences more effectively

Geographic targeting is an effective way to send your message out to a specific audience or demographic based on their location. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have tools that allow you to communicate the right kind of content to your audience. For example, in Hootsuite –  an enhanced tool allowing you to manage all your social media sites from the same page – you can target by location, language, age, gender, relationship status, interested in, and ‘education’ on Facebook.

LGSocial media can help you learn about your audience

Like businesses in any industry sector, the key to success is how much you know about your audience. With tools like Facebook Insights on Hootsuite enhance you can learn about your social media audience as well as their age and gender. Such knowledge can help you cater campaigns and product offers to your target audience, which will provide you a better return on investment.

Improve market intelligence and get ahead of your competitors with social media

With social media monitoring you can gain key information on your competitors, therefore improving your market intelligence. This will allow you to make strategic business decisions in order to stay ahead of your competition. For example, you can create search streams in Hootsuite to monitor mentions of your competitor’s name or product. Based on your search results, you can improve your business to offer something your competitors are missing.

Find out what customers think about your products?

Social media for business gives you instant access to positive or negative feedback, which provides you with valuable insights on the customer perspective. For example, if you launch a new product and share it on social media, you’ll instantly learn what your customers think of it. Another way to gain customer perspective with social media is by learning how they use your product; brands often base new products or services on their customers’ original ideas.

Boost website traffic and increase search ranking

One of the best benefits of social media for business is using it to increase your website traffic. Not only does social media help you direct people to your website, but the more social media shares you receive, the higher your search ranking will be. For example, if every person who follows Hootsuite on Twitter retweets this post, it’s more likely to rank higher in Google’s search engine results page for variations of “social media for business.”

Promote content easier and faster

Content must reach customers in the shortest possible time. When you use social media for business, specifically for sharing content about your business, all you need to do is simply share it on your brand’s social network accounts. But remember that getting your customers to share your content with their followers means you need to make sure your social media content aligns to your brand and interests your audience.

Lexelle has its own social media pages. Click on the links below to find out more.

If you are one of our existing brokers and would like help setting up social media pages email: nbrimacombe@lexelle.com