Toner cartridge supplier’s Ryan Holt emphasises that it is better for businesses to use social media as an engagement tool than to simply gain more followers.
In an article on business news website Bdaily, Ryan Holt of UK toner cartridge supplier TonerGiant discusses how the company has learnt how to utilise social media in the most effective way, finding that it is about who you attract rather than how many people.
Holt claims that when it comes to using social media, many businesses focus on “metrics that aren’t important, or aren’t helping your business by providing return”, with competitions and incentives aiming to attract more followers not necessarily benefitting business in terms of profit.
Instead, TonerGiant found that “if you ask people to follow you for a competition, that’s what they are interested in”, not the business itself, Holt noting that “when the time came to try converting our followers into customers by generating interest in our brand, products activities etc., the engagement rate was minimal”.
The company therefore decided to change its strategy, focusing on the “top level goals” businesses should aim to achieve from reaching out to people using social media: stronger branding, increased visibility, communication with customers and potential customers and increased search engine optimisation (SEO) value.
To achieve these goals, the company opted to use social media to share “high quality, genuinely interesting, industry related content” through the use of a blog, with Holt claiming that “the most important part of a healthy social profile is marketing interesting blog content”. In this way, the company was able to appeal “directly to our target audience” and not just people following the company in the hope of wining a new Xbox.
Recognising that making the toner cartridge industry interesting to everyone is “an impossible task”, TonerGiant decided to link its own topic of ink and toner to other industries such as design, photography and printing and then “spent time marketing this content to the people who were interested, mainly businesses in design, photography or printing”.
While Holt admits that “the process of changing strategy from competitions to content was very slow”, he adds that “once we had the ball rolling the rest took care of itself”, with the company seeing more engagement and interaction from businesses and their target audience as people began liking and sharing its content to others interested in similar topics. “It opened the doors to businesses with related interests in printing that we could guest blog for, giving positive repercussions in SEO,” Holt explained.