Using social media as a marketing tool for your business is an extremely effective strategy, but only if it is done right. Keep in mind the following tips for optimising your business through social media:

Do your research: establish what it is you want to achieve and investigate which social media platforms will help you best achieve this. Consider your target audience and the platforms they engage with most regularly.

Quality not quantity: sharing content that has not been edited can come across as unprofessional. Of course you should use terminology that is appropriate for your target audience, but unintentional punctuation and grammatical errors can make your business look amateur. This applies to photo and video content as well.

Do not over do it: there is nothing worse than spam. Deliver content that is necessary to achieving your goal. It is important to have a regular and consistent social media presence because you do not want your customers to forget about you either, but the content you are sharing needs to be meaningful and provide the viewer with some call to action.

Use your customers as a marketing tool: using social media to develop your business is effective because it provides optimal opportunities for user engagement. How you do this appropriately will depend on your business; encouraging customers to share content for prizes and giveaways is a great way to grow your online community. Engaging customers with your content and making them feel like they have contributed is another great strategy, which can be easily achieved through the use of polls and surveys.

Set goals, evaluate and reevaluate: you will not be able to truly appreciate how effective or ineffective a social media campaign is unless you plan, set goals and assess if they were reached. Evaluating a project during and after its completion allows you to adjust your marketing strategies for future campaigns; optimising social media use and ultimately making your business more money.