5 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Presence

Are you reminding the types of people who like your jewelry that you're online, active, and open for business - on a daily basis? Here are some very helpful tips to improve your social media presence to help you get noticed.

The beauty of social networking is that you can now do this in a less-intrusive and more interactive way than via the one-way - and often impersonal - blast of ads or direct mail. But because the number of social networking users is proliferating, you may need to be even more creative to attract attention in 2014. Here are five tips to get you started.

1. Create a Google Plus company page— and update it

Though Google Plus doesn't have much traction as a traditional social network, it does have 300 million active monthly users, which is more than both Twitter and Instagram (though it is still dwarfed by Facebook's one billion plus users). "If you post about jewelry on Google Plus, consumers will find you," said Matthew Perosi of the Jeweler Website Advisory Group (jWAG.biz) at the MJSA ConFab last November. Why does Google Plus work? It's because company pages there are getting ranked and indexed by Google. So, even though consumers spend far less time socializing on Google Plus, when you update your brand's page on Google Plus, it's more likely to show up in Google's organic search results. Tip: To save time, savvy jewelers often use the same updates, photos, and links that they post on Facebook for Google Plus.

2. Consider Instagram

Though small business owners are getting tired of all the new social networks to learn, Instagram may be worth the effort. The newest survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet Project (released at the end of 2013) indicates that while Facebook is still the dominant social networking platform, a striking number of users are now diversifying. Some 42 percent of online adults now use multiple social networking sites—and Instagram is the only one besides Facebook that users routinely check on a daily basis. Cindy Edelstein of Jewelers Resource Bureau (jewelersresource.com), who advises many jewelry designers, told participants at MJSA ConFab that Instagram was producing excellent results for her clients. Pew data shows that the image-sharing service is particularly popular among younger adults and urban dwellers, so if your customer demographics skew in this direction—get going!

3. Indulge in user-generated content

If you haven't started asking your fans to post photos of themselves wearing your pieces, you're not taking full advantage of what marketing experts call User Generated Content. It's a much more personal kind of endorsement than the written product reviews you see on sites such as Yelp. "Old-school product reviews reduce your brand to an arbitrary five-point rating," says Apu Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Curalate (curalate.com), a marketing and analytics platform for the visual web. "But you're not a star rating… You have a personality, a culture, and a style. Think about real people in the real world rocking your products. With funky angles, fun locations, and filters galore, a glorious celebration of your brand emerges. And when you feature these irreverent moments, you tell the world you enjoy letting your hair down."

4. Become a content curator

"It's not just about content creation; it's also about content curation," says Atri Chatterjee, CMO of Act-On (act-on.com), a marketing automation software company. What he means is that you're not cheating if you find interesting articles or blog posts related to a theme or color or other aspect of your jewelry—and share them with your social networks.

This is especially helpful if you are a small company that doesn't have the time or resources to create original content on a daily basis to feed the social networking beast. Be sure, however, to add your own thoughts or point of view about the item you're sharing. For example, you might find an article about blackening silver, and explain to your fans why such a metal treatment fascinates you. "We will see an increase in the ratio of content disseminators to original content creators in 2014," Chatterjee believes.

5. Get your point across - fast

"Noise-addled consumers are investing less time and brainpower in the content they consume—which means creators need to make content simple, easy, clear, and visual," says Stacey King Gordon, the founder and president of Suite Seven (suiteseven.com), a content strategy and brand communication consultancy.

Business communications consultant Steve Woodruff agrees, saying, "The most important realization that we must come to is that other people only have a very small box to put us into. In my mind, you're going to get one memory space, one mental pixel. If you force me to figure you out, I'll probably get it wrong. So simplify it by giving me one clear and vivid summary. You'll make it through the noise if your message is punchy, appealing, tangible, aspirational, [and] memorable."