Social media make it possible to reach hundreds or even thousands of potential customers, build your business and establish your reputation with the local community, all for little or no cost. And, these days, a social media presence is like a website – people expect to be able to communicate with the people they do business with and, if they can’t find you, they might look elsewhere.

“You can’t afford not to be having the conversation on social media,” says Tina Tower, chief executive officer of Begin Bright School Readiness and Primary Tutoring Centres. “But you must understand social media to use it effectively – and using it for marketing purposes is very different from just staying in touch with friends.”

Personal contact

Begin Bright has a presence on all platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus but focuses most of its efforts on Facebook.

“Our target market is mainly mums with young children and Facebook is where they hang out,” says Tower. “We have an overall brand page and all of our centres have their own page as well. The brand page is where we do things that are of interest to our broadest audience – things like education and promotions that apply to the whole of Australia. The individual franchisee pages are all about local engagement. For example, one franchisee recently posted an invitation to a toddlers’ Christmas morning tea – it’s a great way to communicate on that very personal level.”

Few new Begin Bright recruits have used Facebook for business and some have never used it at all.

“We provide everything they need to get started and manage their page effectively including social media manuals and training videos on our intranet,” says Tower. “We also give them a suggested marketing plan for Facebook with ideas for topics. Some people follow it to the letter, some don’t – and some go above and beyond. The ones who do it well get a lot of their business from Facebook.”

Starting the conversation

“A big mistake a lot of businesses make is to use Facebook purely as a marketing tool,” says Tower. “It’s called social media because that’s exactly what it is – a way of engaging with people. When you’re starting out, post things that are of interest to you and your target market to get the conversation going and build your confidence. Then you can do some marketing – but, for every call-to-action-type post you should have at least 10 social posts to maintain the engagement.”

It’s also important to remember that Facebook and other social media are public forums.

“We have policies in place and we monitor the pages to ensure that nothing political, offensive or capable of dividing a community is being posted,” says Tower. “As we work with children, we also have to be very careful about the way we use any photographs of them in class or at a social event, for example. We teach our franchisees to be extremely careful about what they say and how they say it but, if you follow a few simple rules, Facebook and other social media are brilliant and proven marketing tools.”