In a recent study, Facebook reported that they have seen a drastic increase in usage on some of their platforms such as WhatsApp and messenger. Whilst messaging has increased by 50%, the company has also seen video calling double in some markets.

This presents an opportunity for businesses to use these social platforms to reach their audiences or potential customers. The question that business owners now ask themselves is, how?

In this article, I will highlight four key things you should keep in mind as you go about using Social Media to market your business.

Re-evaluate your strategy

The starting point would be to take a look at your current marketing strategy to establish how this has been disrupted. If you have already been using digital channels to market your business, you’ll be focusing on evaluating the channels and budget allocation. You can run short test campaigns on the respective platforms to find out which channels are delivering better and allocate the budget appropriately: recent research shows that some of the top performing campaigns are from social media advertising and S.E.O efforts. If you have never used digital channels consider getting in touch with reputable advertising firms in your market to consult on how you can get started.

Focus more on audience growth and less on increasing your conversion rate

Consumer spending has been limited to only the essentials, so odds are that you might not see a high conversion rate from your marketing efforts. Now is the time to grow your online audience so put out content that does exactly that. Educational, inspirational, some light-hearted and humorous content such as memes should do the trick. By doing this you are thinking about the long term when this pandemic passes and everything Is back to normal, you’ll have a huge audience base to increase your conversion rate.

Go Live!

Live video is defiantly the way to go during this time. People are held up in their homes and are looking for some kind of human connection even if it is just a friendly face, they can ask questions on Instagram or Facebook Live. So putting a face to your brand will help create an emotional connection between your audience and your brand.

Partner with influencers

With the increase in social media activity, there is a high demand for online content which means your brand needs to put out a lot more content. But with the restricted movement, you might not be about to make as many product photos or video shoots like you did before this is where the influencers come in. They are a lot more flexible and can put out a lot more content to their already existing audience faster than you can.

Content is still king during this time it’s what will help you form a meaningful connection between your brand and your audience which will rip benefits in the future. But be thoughtful of the content you put out, err on the side of caution and avoid idioms or phrases that could be considered offensive.