Social media is a characteristic of the 21st century. It is dominant in many industries, and there is literally no industry in the world which can’t benefit from it. Placed right, it attracts people to your business – mostly any business – and increases your potential for success.

We’ve already mentioned social media a great deal for digital signage uses, but it was basically a footnote of what an excellent additional tool it can be. You may have gotten an idea or two from that brief scrape, but now we’re going deep.

You’ve chosen your location, you’ve set up your digital signage. Now let’s study how you should use one of the most powerful, not to forget easy, tools one can apply to digital signage: social media!

Create a balance between social media and promotional content

Benefits: Fresh, unpredictable and appealing content will increase the odds of a viewer paying attention to promotions you show alongside social media.

All social media can be an excellent source of content since it’s interesting and one of the most effective methods to engage people. Additionally, it helps in balancing out promotional content and making your campaigns appear as interesting as they are promotional. 

Digital signage is highly effective, but despite its freshness in the advertising world, people get accustomed to promotions very quickly. It can be difficult to attract them at that point, but social media can break this barrier.

When creating your campaigns, incorporate social media platforms at various points to break the pattern of repetitive promotions. A few minutes of tweets every now and then will create a noticeable difference in content. Establish the peak hours when there are more customers than usual and include social media alongside promotional messages to increase the odds of people paying attention.

Encourage image sharing on social networks

Benefits: Higher brand awareness because every satisfied customer who shares an image of your business becomes a new model.

People love to share content others give them credit for being interesting. They want approval and appreciation, even in something as minor as likes and shares on social media. Your digital signage can give them just that.

You can set up a campaign to pitch social media on your digital displays. Show people how to get their message to appear on your screen. All social media users know the general functionality, thus all it takes is an appropriate #hashtag and they’ll know what to do.

Interactivity, although highly effective, is not a must. All that is needed is a live feed of social media content on your displays. Interactive displays connect the user’s sphere even closer to the screen. Users shoot images directly from the digital signage and post them on their social media. This is inviting and simple to use, plus it’s something new: this is always a powerful factor when it comes to younger generations. Some great examples for interactive uses of digital signage social media are the digital signage selfie stations which are quite effective given that selfies are commonplace today.

Provoke feedback through social media

Benefits: Show that you care about opinions, both good and bad, and that you act on them.

Sharing images, videos and fun facts are excellent sources of content from any social media channel. Feedback is one which you source directly from your customers through an online form or directly at your store. It may not always be roses, though.

Be active on social media, respond directly and interact with people, making your online presence noticeable. 

A “How did we do?” message will encourage customers to respond through your selected social media platform. People will gladly share their opinions if asked, but be prepared for all types of responses, especially the negative ones. You might find yourself nit-picking the positive ones and only sharing those with your followers, but negative ones can be of use to you as well.

By sharing negative feedback alongside positive, it implies you care about the opinions of your customers. Not only that, it also implies you correct mistakes and push forward to building the perfect business.

Don’t neglect available social media tools

Benefits: Find the perfect content for your business with ease (or even automatically!)

You may think “Twitter and Instagram is all I really need. Oh, and Facebook!” but there is a lot more you can do than just sharing hashtags and hope for the best.

All social media sites are virtually endless sources of content, but it becomes tricky to find that content and highlight it. This is why there are so many tools out there that interact with social media sites to bring you the information you can use best.

Here are only a few social media tools to look into.

• Postano is a tool designed to inform you about your audience. It’s focus is social media visualization which allows you to understand which hashtags across all social media provoke the highest response rates, what the peak hours of the day are, the current trends in business, and much more. This is a great tool to give you insight into what your audience responds to, when, and why.
• PropsBoard does a similar thing only on an internal level by focusing on using social media to highlight the work well done by individuals on the inside of the fence.
• Screenfeed provides a multitude of features you can use, including social media management. It allows you to select content from social media you want to share and set up specific filters which will assist in generating automated content.
• Tagboard uses hashtags to select specific social media content and share it on your displays within seconds after publishing.

There are many tools out there, but naturally you shouldn’t use every single tool one without distinction. Instead, focus on what you need most. If you want to encourage fresh up-to-second updates, then certain tools will be more favourable to you than others. Meanwhile, maybe you want a social media feed you can pre-set and control to the letter to use in a business environment. Check out this list of 13 tools designed for the epic combo that is digital signage and all social media.

Social media is an excellent source for your digital signage campaigns. It is automatically generated, it lets people’s voices be heard, it is effective and above all, it is beneficial to a company of any size or type.

With over 2.46 billion users of any social media type worldwide in 2017, it is certain that this virtual playing field is vast and can benefit you as much as it can any global corporation with a vast customer base.

There is room for everyone, and it’s very clear why all social media works so well in combination with digital signage.

Images by Michael Coghlan, UCView and Till Carlos.