To support businesses in Wales, Superfast Business Wales have created a digital toolkit designed to help businesses improve efficiency, streamline operations, boost security, and often reduce costs.

Listing over 100 cloud-based solutions, the Digital Toolkit For Business will help you find software and services you can rely on. All products listed are presented for information and research only, and any recommendations are not designed to be comprehensive or act as a specific endorsement from Superfast Business Wales.

DOWNLOAD A COPY OF THE DIGITAL TOOLKIT HERE

In the next part of this series, we look how businesses can use cloud based solutions to manage and monitor their social media strategy.

If your business is looking to increase brand awareness, gain trust, and demonstrate thought leadership, developing a social media strategy should be a priority.

A well planned social media strategy should be a core component within your marketing and communications plan, helping your brand stand out from the crowd, build an audience of informed followers, and create an inbound marketing process where you can generate new business leads.

Building a campaign on social media without a defined strategy can however be counterproductive. You’ll find yourself just posting for the sake of it, with little rhyme or reason, and as a result, you will see minimal results.

Without an engagement mentality, social media is just media. Your social media strategy shouldn’t be one dimensional, remember users don’t always use social networks for a one-way experience.

Social reach has dropped across all social media platforms in recent years. However, accounts with high social engagement are trending in the opposite direction. Social networks are now using “meaningful engagement” as an important metric that a post should be prioritised within their platform.

Social engagement is a measure of how your potential customers are interacting with your social content and includes:

• Likes and Favourites
• Comments, DMs, Replies
• Shares and Retweets
• Saves
• Clicks
• Mentions

Social media has had a dramatic impact on modern businesses, with many customers preferring to interact with companies (and support their favourite brands) via Facebook and Twitter.

Social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to control ‘how’ and ‘when’ you share information on your preferred channels, as well as tracking what’s being said about your company online.