Although building a business is far from easy – growing a business is even harder.

Growth is about increasing numbers, improving processes, selling and expanding. To sell your services and increase reach – look at marketing your agency with social media. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Google can also be extremely valuable tools for sharing content and being seen by huge amounts of people:

1. LINKEDIN

If you are growing a business, LinkedIn is an incredible tool which provides big business development, branding and networking opportunities, mostly because it’s super untapped.

LinkedIn is still the best platform for professional content. It has 500 million users, 250 million of which are active monthly users, 40% of whom use the platform every day.

What’s more, LinkedIn is still growing: the number of users went from 470 million in 2016 to 500 million at the start of 2018 and counting. This is the best place to show off your best work, add value and get credibility.

The thing with content on LinkedIn, or any platform for that matter, is that you almost never know what will work and what won’t. What will resonate and what won’t. I have created pieces of content I thought were going to fly, go viral and get me hundreds of interested eyes. Wrong. At times I’ve had to check that content was actually live because it was getting zero attention, zero interaction, I mean none at all. Then I’d send out a piece of content that was good (I’d never send out something I don’t feel passionate about), but perhaps extremely rough – shot in the car or as I walk Sofia, our boxer dog – and it would get traction as if I was paying people to interact (which, by the way, I don’t).

We never know what will get a good uptake. If you spend a month and a few hundred, if not thousand, pounds creating a polished video, and then get no engagement, the disappointment of the low interaction burns on your skin like lemon juice on a papercut.

2. FACEBOOK

Advertising on Facebook is a very good idea. Why?

· You can target Joe Smith, marketing manager at Brand X in North London! The targeting capabilities of Facebook allow you to target by location, interest, page likes and more.

· You could target people with an interest in digital marketing who work in the sector you are targeting.

· You could target people with an interest in SEO, who are in a sector you’re targeting and who like the Google Analytics Facebook page.

The possibilities are almost endless, and, if the message is correct, you have a real opportunity to grow your brand awareness within your target market for next to nothing because Facebook is dead cheap. You can buy video ads on Facebook for peanuts. I have reached 10,400 people with a video advert and spent £19, and received 12.5K impressions; that’s a £1.5 CPM on a platform where most of these would be on mobile, meaning my video would have taken up 80%, if not more, of their screen. That’s crazy, and it’s crazy not to do this.

3. INSTAGRAM

Instagram is pictures and videos, right? Wrong. Instagram is everything that pictures and videos can say, and they can both say a lot. Instagram can be a better communication tool than Facebook because on Instagram you have to get your absolute best content in one picture or 60-second video. As I write this, Instagram is about to launch the functionality to post longer videos – IGTV has landed – but its effectiveness and uptake are still uncertain. We shall see, I guess. But for the short, one-minute video, there’s a lot that can be done. Those who nail this, those who are able to communicate inspiring and memorable messages through imagery and short videos, win. What this means is that creativity wins, not just large budgets. That’s exciting because it means smaller organisations can beat the shit out of larger ones.

4. YOUTUBE

YouTube is an incredible channel because it allows you to connect with people from within your target market when they are watching videos. Despite what you might hear about Instagram taking YouTube’s audience with IGTV, people still watch YouTube when they have something in mind they want to watch. YouTube is a search engine, it’s not a social channel the way Instagram is. I have the TED app, for example, but I usually watch TED talks on YouTube. I watch ‘how to’ videos on YouTube. The Joe Rogan Experience. Music concerts too. Sometimes, if I’m terribly bored, I watch news bloopers or ‘Sacha Baron Cohen best clips’…all on YouTube.

YouTube has more than a billion users. 95% of advertisers would tell you YouTube doesn’t work for advertising. Those 95% are amateur advertisers. Professional advertisers will tell you that YouTube works incredibly well, just not to drive immediate sales. YouTube works super well to drive brand uplift and generate brand awareness, direct eyeballs to your brand, get new customers and increase the share of voice your brand has.

• Luca Senatore is the author of new book The Agency and the director at multi-award-winning digital agency Genie Goals.