When first starting a small home business, you probably won’t have a lot of money and other important resources that you can invest in your company. Simply put, you need to find cheap solutions and do as much as possible on your own until you put your business on its feet.
One of the essentials aspects of your business is marketing, and you need to start with your marketing efforts as soon as you start operating. Luckily, there are many strategies for marketing on a budget, one of the most effective ones being social media.
Given the fact that everyone has personal social media accounts today, a lot of people consider the possibility of building up their personal profiles and using them to market their business. So, is this a good idea, can it be done and how? Let’s discuss.
Branding
Social networks are some of the best platforms for personal and business branding. Through regular activity, posts, comments, discussions and sharing, you can create a brand around your profile and your business. With personal profiles, you have already created a certain brand around you and this is why they are more suitable for personal branding.
People have already formed their opinions about you and gotten used to the way you behave online and, depending on how you’ve acted online so far, this could either work in your favor or against you. If you’ve been goofy, posting memes, arguing with people and writing everything that popped into your mind, then trying to build on that in order to market your business could be a catastrophic failure.
If people don’t take you seriously, they will never take your business seriously. However, if your activities revolved around things within your business niche and if you engaged people in thoughtful discussions, making them trust your opinion, you can ride that wave to further promote your brand.
Your connections are important
When we use our personal social media, we don’t put in much thought about who we connect with, who sees what we share and what we see. Suddenly, when you reflect on your home business and the people you’ve connected with, this becomes one of the top priorities.
Although you might love your aunt from abroad and you like to keep in touch, she isn’t actually the person to whom you can market your business. Still, if your business is local there might be a lot of people in your list that could be interested in what you have to offer.
On top of that, your close friends and family members who are in the same area also have other connections with people around them. This means that they can be a good catalyst for spreading the word about your business by engaging with posts about your products and services.
The important thing is to determine the target audience for your business and to see whether or not your connections fit into this category. If not, then it’s probably a good idea to create professional accounts and pages on social networks.
Look at things from a content perspective
What you publish, post and share on social media matters. People learn more about you from the information you share and that’s how they view you. If you have photos of you clubbing, being drunk, or doing something stupid with your friends, you might be perceived as funny, but it won’t help you show them that you are serious about your business.
They will instantly get a negative impression and think that you and your business aren’t professional. Remember, everything stays on social media for a long time, and even if you work hard on removing all the “negative” content, chances are that someone has already taken screenshots or has some information saved.
All of this can backfire in the future, so think carefully before you decide anything. A sudden change of direction in your content won’t make your long-lasting connections feel good and they will think that you are faking it or trying to trick them in some way. If they don’t respect you, they won’t respect your business, it’s as simple as that.
Separating personal from professional
The first thing you need to understand is that the fact that you have been using social networks privately doesn’t mean that you will know how to use them for marketing purposes, because these two are completely different. No matter if you decide to use your personal accounts for business purposes or create new ones, you will have to use them correctly.
First of all, you will need to learn to control yourself. If you like to comment on politics, sports and share your thoughts on these subjects, then create a new business profile where you will NOT do this. You need to be professional, talk to people with respect and engage only in conversations that are relevant to your business, offer help, insightful information and keep personal opinions to yourself.
Forget about sharing funny posts, family pictures or travel videos. Your activities need to revolve around your business, sharing information about discounts, new products, services, thoughts, success stories, product images and so on. If your relationship with your connections is based on sharing funny content and personal stories, this could potentially harm your business efforts as well.
In the end, marketing a business on personal social accounts can be done successfully and give you a headstart, but only if you’ve considered the things we mentioned above and you are sure that there isn’t even a hint of any serious issues.
Additionally, you will have to put in extra effort yourself and start using your account completely differently. Still, in my opinion, creating new business profiles is more transparent and gives you a fresh start to build a name for your business.
