Attracting committed investors is important for most businesses. Whether you’re leading a growing corporation or a small family enterprise, the right investment can improve your trajectory. This is why it is so vital to establish tools that bring your company to the attention of those with capital to provide.
Social media is an increasingly important part of this. Over the last couple of decades, new media has become a powerful influencer of investment behavior. Negative news stories can spread around the globe in an instant, damaging reputations. While social media posts can help investors to assess the emotional connections demographics have to a brand. By taking time to understand social media as an agile tool, you can encourage investors toward engaging with you.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can use social media to raise your small business’s portfolio with investors.
Identify Trends
Your social media channels are key points of engagement with your business. However, you’re not going to raise the portfolio of your business if your investors and other stakeholders are unable to find you. As such, it’s important to put effort into identifying and utilizing the current trends. This helps to inform and maneuver your posts into a position where they benefit from greater investor visibility.
This begins with committing to research what is trending within your industry. You need to regularly assess what is attractive or important to consumers, your partners and competitors, and investors in your sector. You can start by creating a list of hashtags and keywords used on social media by related businesses and projects. In 2012, the movie studio Lionsgate saw its stock rise 67% because investors were tracking Hunger Games-related hashtags and predicted the adaptation’s popularity. Make no mistake, investors are paying attention here.
Utilizing tools like Google Trends can help you further understand the current engagement with search terms and related trending ideas. You don’t just then fill your social media posts with these keywords. Rather, it’s more useful to utilize these to get a solid idea about what is currently and continually important to your stakeholders. You can then start to build content and meaningful conversations around these topics.
This isn’t only useful for making sure investors can associate you with relevant topics. You should also be performing social listening assessments around these trending terms. This involves researching what people are saying on social media about your brand concerning these. Keep adjusting your posts to ensure that when investors perform their social media research on your business, they’re seeing you as an authority on relevant trends.
Showcase Value
Raising your small business’s portfolio often comes down to demonstrating the value your company provides. Young investors, in particular, are increasingly using social media to research their investment prospects. It’s vital that when they visit your profiles, they have an immediate sense of value perception.
Particularly when it comes to small family businesses, investors need to see your value isn’t static or un-innovative. You need to make it clear your family enterprise has diversified its capital investment in an agile way. This suggests you are minimizing the risk for investors as well as taking advantage of multiple revenue streams. Showcase your expansion into new sectors by sharing conversations with your new partners. Highlight how you’ve bolstered your retail store with subscription options.
In addition, investors need to understand how the public perceives not just your commercial value but your cultural values. Consumers are increasingly making engagement decisions based on ethical alignment. This doesn’t just mean making the occasional post regarding popular social activism. L’Oreal faced severe backlash in 2020 when its Black Lives Matter post drew examples of where the company’s recent race-related decisions were hypocritical. As such, your efforts need to be stronger. You need to have public conversations with your followers about the issues important to them. Showcase authentic relationships with your followers and consumers and a commitment to transparency on issues like sustainability.
Demonstrate a Practical Tool
Investors need to understand how you’re using your social media. They’re unlikely to expect a small business to be constantly connected to online platforms. At the same time, they should recognize how customers regard your channels as a practical extension of your company. It’s not just a marketing asset you’re spending capital on, rather it works much harder.
Omnichannel customer service is one of the key demands for consumers at the moment. They expect to be able to get the same level of service from online contact as they would in-store. As such, there need to be clear examples of this happening on your feed. Indeed, pinning invitations for customers to gain assistance to the top of social media profile pages can be a vital contact point. Not to mention that it’s the first thing investors will see when they visit your channels.
It’s also wise to post social media content that is geared toward boosting practical customer experience. This could be video instructions to more effectively use your products. It may be podcasts that highlight your company’s expertise in key areas. From investors’ perspectives, monetizing your social media content also shows you’re thinking about how to recoup the costs involved in production.
Conclusion
Attracting investment can be the key to ensuring your small business can thrive. Utilizing your social media channels to leverage trending topics can increase your visibility to potential investors. Promote the various ways your business provides value and highlight the practical elements that make your channels attractive to users. By understanding how to adapt your platforms to stakeholder needs, you can make your company a more popular focus for new capital.
