Social Media Company Pages for Print: The Ultimate Guide
Social media can be a powerful tool for print businesses when done correctly. Oftentimes, print companies either feel like they don’t know how to take advantage of social media or question the effectiveness of it in the industry.
We are here to say that social media for print works and we’re sharing a guide on why it’s critical to your print business and how to get started with it.
Why Social Media Company Pages are Important to Your Print Business
According to Sprout Social, there are 3.96 billion social media users as of the beginning of this year. That alone is reason enough why it’s critical to have a presence on social media. Additionally, The amount of time adults use social media across all platforms is now higher than ever, over 90 minutes per day.
Your customers are on social media. They may not find you directly from your company Facebook or LinkedIn page, but if they find your website from a search result, they are without a doubt going to your social media pages to not only check out your work, but to even see that you exist online.
Posting to social media consistently doesn’t have to be 5 posts per day Sunday – Saturday. It can be a few posts per week starting out. Simply having content out there is an easy way to show customers you’re legit, have a large number of print capabilities and you’re ready to work with them.
How to Set Up Company Pages on Social Media
The most critical part to setting up Company Social Media Pages for your print business is to ensure you are creating a business or company page, not using your personal accounts. Too often, we’ve seen companies using the Owner or Marketing Director’s social media accounts to promote the company and it leads to a confusion for customers. You should have dedicated Company pages for your business but you will need to access the Facebook and LinkedIn pages via your personal page (we’ll explain further down).
To create your company page, you will need to have a personal Facebook account (even if you don’t plan to use it personally). Facebook requires an actual person, or profile, to create the account.
If you don’t have a personal account, you can follow the steps to create one here.
To create your company page, you’ll need to go to facebook.com/pages/create. From there, you’ll add your Print Company Name as the Page Name, the Category that describes your business (likely something Print related) and a description of your company (you can start with a blurb from your about page to make it easy).
You’ll click Create Page and then be prompted to add a Profile Photo which we recommend you use your logo. From there, you can follow the prompts from Facebook on how to finish setting up your Company page.
For more help on setting up a Facebook Company Page, you can click on this link.
Similar to Facebook, you’ll need a personal LinkedIn profile to create a LinkedIn Company Page. If you don’t have one and need to set one up, you can do so here.
Once logged into your personal profile, click on the Work icon then click on Create a Company Page.
Select Company as the page type, then you’ll fill in information about your business (Company Name, Website URL, Industry, Organization Size). It will prompt you to upload your Logo to use as your profile photo.
It will ask you to verify that you are an authorized person to create and manage the account by checking the box. Then click Create Page.
For more help on setting up a LinkedIn Company Page, you can find information here.
You do not need a personal Instagram account to create a Business Profile. To create a Business Profile for your print company, navigate to https://www.instagram.com/ and click on Sign Up. From there, enter an email address, phone number, Company name, and you’ll need to create a username and password that gets used when you want to login.
You’ll be logged into your account at that point and to make the account a Business Profile, not a personal profile, you’ll need to go to follow these steps:
- Tap Settings.
- Tap Account.
- Tap Switch to Professional Account.
- Select a Category for your Business
- Connect your business account to a Facebook Page that is associated with your business.
- Tap Done.
For more information on setting up a Business Account on Instagram, click here.
For Twitter, you can create a Company Page without needing a personal Twitter account.
To create the account, go to https://twitter.com/ and click on “Sign Up with Phone or Email”
From there, you’ll enter your Business Name, phone number and your date of birth(used for verification). You can also use an email address instead of a phone number. If you would rather do that, click on “Use email instead”.
After filling in the initial information, follow the steps to customize your Twitter profile and experience. TIP: Make sure your username is your Company Name because that’s how people will be able to find and tag your company.
For more on setting up a Twitter Company Profile, click here.
Top Tips for Your Social Media Pages
You can’t expect to know everything about social media if you’re just starting out. So we’re sharing a few of our top tips to get you started with Social Media Company Pages.
1. Business & Personal Should Be Separate
It may seem easier to just use you or someone else’s personal social media profiles to promote your business because they already exist and may have followers, likes, connections, etc. But, it’s critical that you create seperate business pages for a few reasons.
First, it keeps the business isolated and the page can be full of company related posts (pictures of work you’ve done, customer testimonials, promotion of products/services, etc.) If you use a personal profile, it may be bogged down by non-company related posts that would be confusing to someone looking to do business with you.
Second, there are features only available to Company/Business Social Media pages. If you are using a Personal account, you won’t have access to features such as tracking and reporting, scheduling and account access management.
2. Keep Your Goal of Social Media In Mind
Once you start actively using social media, it may unlock a world of ideas of things you can post, share, etc but it’s important to keep the goal you have for your company social media in mind. You want to attract and maintain business so you should be sharing content relevant to that. Share pictures of projects you’ve printed and/or installed, industry updates and even the fun more personal stuff such as staff parties or current events. Make sure what you are posting or sharing is valuable to those looking to do business with you.
3. Post to Your Pages Regularly
The key to a well maintained social media page is activity. You can post as little as a few days a week to as much as a few times a day. Whatever you choose, make sure you’re posting regularly to keep your presence active. Customers are not only looking at your social media pages to validate your business but search engines are also looking at your pages which helps with your overall digital presence.
While social media can be valuable to your print business, we know it can be overwhelming so we hope that sharing this guide to company pages helps get your social media off the ground. If you’re looking for more help, we offer courses on social media post creation and publishing as well as offer pre-written social posts that can take the guesswork out of social media each month.