As a young entrepreneur who has been in the business environment for a while, Samuel Onuha has been privileged to observe the growth of social media importance in the business clime and how it has changed the way business is conducted. He notes that social media has played a huge role in business planning, ideation, design thinking, program management and most importantly, sales and marketing. As a young business man who knows the importance of branding in business and personal life, he utilizes social media as a strong tool in brand visibility.
“Social media is the biggest thing at the moment. I don’t know anyone who spends money and time online but is not on social media; that’s just never the case. If you have a business that provides online services or even any service, it is a must, a 1000% must to be on social media. People need to be able to find you and social media platforms is where they can easily do that. The businesses and successes I have had all had something to do with social media. Looking at the future, it can only be bigger. Your best bet as a business man or a young entrepreneur is to grow your brand on social media. “
Noting that the digital space will only get bigger and better with social media at the forefront, he encourages every entrepreneur who want to scale their business to take their social media presence seriously. Samuel Onuha shares some of the principles and techniques that he uses to leverage social media as a tool in fostering his business and personal successes below:
- Be Strategic
There are various social media platforms and each one has certain features that makes them unique and appeal to a certain audience. The approach to selling on these platforms must also be different. Your marketing strategy on Instagram must not be same as that as Twitter. Despite the slightly different marketing strategies, your brand must be the same on all social media platforms. You do not want to be known as a fashionpreneur on Instagram and a Content creator on Twitter. You’ll have to find a way to market your businesses and yourself in entirety without having different identities on different social media platforms. If you want to have unique brands for your various businesses, create separate accounts for each of them on all social media platforms. That way, you do not confuse your audience and look like you’re incompetent.
- Follow the trends
As an entrepreneur, you must be informed and aware of new trends in your niche and any other sphere that may affect your business. As new trends emerge, study and understand them. After getting a thorough understanding of the new trend, make sure you’re proactive by implementing them in your business. It is easy to become irrelevant and archaic in this digital era due to the speed at which things changes. Thus, you must network with stakeholders in your niche on social media platforms and make sure you are known as a brand that keeps with trends and time.
- Separate your business and personal life
As a business, you must not use your social media platforms to promote personal beliefs or ideas especially those related to sensitive topics like religion and politics; you can do so on your personal social media platforms. If your personal and business branding are interrelated such that you cannot have separate social media platforms for each, for example in the case of a music artiste, OAP, actress or model, try as much as possible to ensure that you release contents that only promote your unique brand.
- Identify with your target market
As a business, your customer is not everyone. There are a specific set of people that your business is catered to attend to. Knowing this, you must structure your social media presence in a way that’ll appeal to them. You cannot be a logistics company and post contents related to food on your social media platforms. Of course, as an entrepreneur, you would have done market survey and research. The results of this research will guide the contents you post and how you engage people on social media platforms.
Samuel Onuha has utilized all these strategies and more towards the growth of his business and has recorded remarkable success. His success story is proof that you have to be intentional about your brand and ensure that you effectively utilize social media to increase your business growth.
