Social Media for small business can get overwhelming. But you don’t require to obtain a million followers or have a sleek brand campaign to effectively use social media, which is now the best way to connect to customers—both old and potential ones. According to Sprout, 57.5% of people are more likely to buy from your business if you have a social media account. So, when you don’t have a presence on the major social media platforms, you stand to miss out on customers who are ready and enthusiastic to connect to your brand.
So, here are 20 social media marketing tips to guide you in your journey towards better customer engagement and business:
1. Begin with a Plan
Every effective business strategy begins with a good plan, and it is no different for social media management for small business.
Since it is so tempting to just start posting organically for free, that you may want to dive in today and just begin. However, without a plan, it’s hard to move forward.
When you create a plan, keep the following things in mind:
- Establish social media objectives and goals
- Study your competition
- Manage a social media account
- Find stimulus
- Make a social media calendar
2. Decide the Right Platform for You
Never assume you know which social media platform your audience spends most of their time on. You might think you can skip Facebook and focus on Snapchat and Instagram but you could be wrong.
Hootsuite has compiled data on all major social media sites, and you will find people still do use Facebook a lot. Also, remember that you can use various social networking sites to reach various audiences.
3. Research Your Audience
When you want to use social media for small business, you need to find your target audience.
However, before that, you have to understand your audience, who they are, that is.
By collecting information on your current audience and then delving deeper with analytics can help you create a robust image of who is purchasing from you and who is communicating with you already online.
Then you can go back to the drawing board and find ways to reach more people.
4. Develop Relationships
One factor that makes social media marketing stand over other forms of marketing is the way you can reach and communicate with your followers and customers.
You can develop relationships eventually, rather than charging for a sale up front. This is why, according to a Twitter and Research Now report, 93% of people who follow small businesses plan to buy from them.
When people interact with your ads or organic content, you can waltz in and respond, helping to develop trust and shape the initial stages of a satisfying customer relationship.
5. Increase Your Audience
Once you have carved your space in the niche market you targeted, you don’t have to stagnate; you can use social media tools to reach to new customers.
With Website Design and Development Company like GoSupps, for example, started their business targeted only at bodybuilders, but they slowly expanded into the fitness and overall sports demographic by using Facebook’s targeting options.
Now they have 97,000 Facebook fans.
6. Use Compelling Visuals
No one can imagine a social post without a visual element. Internal data from Twitter shows that people are more likely to interact with visually appealing Tweets with photos, GIFs, infographics or videos.
The power of social images cannot be denied, especially when most people today make plans for traveling or going to restaurants based on images and videos shared on social media sites.
7. Focus on Quality
There are way too many options for small businesses when it comes to social media but you don’t need to explore every option.
Focus on the channels that receive the most engagement and develop content for those to maintain the quality of your channel.
There is no need to spread yourself thin to focus your brand presence everywhere. Most of all, your posts should offer value; if you only pitch and sell for marketing small business, then people would be unmotivated to follow you.
8. Use the Correct Tools
The code to powerful social media optimization is to use tools that simplify or automate most of the work.
There are so many tools to help you with social media posting so you can use other marketing better for other parts of your business without the need to hire and train a whole social media department.
You can use tools like:
- Analytics
- Engagement management
- Content curation
- Graphics
9. Monitor and React to Conversations About Your Brand
It is important to respond to people who comment or ask questions on your social accounts. But there is more to social engagement.
You have to know what people are talking about your brand in other places, especially outside your accounts.
Tagging or retweeting are some ways to find out what everyone is saying about your brand. Don’t forget to respond to such things if possible. This is called social listening.
10. Schedule Content
We discussed organizing a social content calendar at the beginning of this list, and we will explain it later on, but this is relevant to the practice of making calendars.
Once you put the calendar in action, you can design social posts beforehand and apply scheduling tools for automatic posting at right times.
This lets you commit creating social content at certain times every day and lets posting not become an activity that takes your attention away from other tasks.
11. Monitor and Improve Your Performance
Social media analytics tools can help you track the metrics working for you. Once you have this baseline picture of the effectiveness of your strategy, you can start to enhance results.
You can use A/B testing to make small edits to the strategies that bolster your success gradually.
12. Commit to the Plan
To ensure success, the first thing you have to do is committing to social media. Like any other kind of marketing, social media for small business can be a real struggle.
It can be hard to build an audience, make great content and boost engagement. Many times, brands just give up on social media after some time.
On average, it takes 8 months to a year to master social media not only to obtain regular content stream but to comprehend what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t.
13. Show the Brand’s Personality
Always be you on social media accounts. Take a look at other brands on social media and wonder what makes them different and what makes you follow them.
Their content can be great and the way they post it must reflect their brand’s personality very well. Building a presence is not about the product or the service you provide to customers, it is also about experiences and connections.
Your brand personality will instinctively attract audiences.
14. Success Accompanies Passion
This social media marketing tip wants you to remember that your passion will help generate really memorable and awesome content. Social media success takes time.
As mentioned, it will take you at least more than 8 months to gain any kind of traction. But this doesn’t mean you don’t put your passion in these 8 months.
Only when you follow your passion for content, the work becomes less of a burden.
15. Try Video Marketing
Right now, video marketing is creating quite the buzz, so keeping a plan for video marketing on the side can be advantageous.
Firstly, most marketers struggle with the “what” part of their video. The easiest solution to this is, to begin with, what works for you based on your blog content that has the most traffic, for example.
Pay attention to video length. For example, on Facebook, the videos with the highest engagement are only 60 to 90 seconds long. So, shorten your videos and keep them to the point.
When you use people, get a good microphone, use natural light and get a tripod. You would need lighting, camera stability and sound to make high-quality videos.
If you prefer an animated explainer video, you need stock videos, good background tracks, and a video editor.
16. Learn About the Customer Journey
It is known widely what steps you can take to drive engagement, leads or sales. It could be a campaign, marketing channel or even content.
The problem most have is that they don’t have a one-touch customer journey that leads to a sale on the initial visit.
The customer journey is difficult but you can always look at the content that is resonating with them and survey them to know how they go about their decision-making process.
17. Apply Agile Methods
Ebooks, webinars, long-form content and whitepapers can be the best way for engagement. However, these are all massive investments in the stage of content creation before expanding can begin.
An effective way to test out social and understand the correct content types, rate of posting, timing, targeting option, etc., is to do more smaller, regular tests.
Agile marketing becomes an important way to do things as it features the agile philosophy used in Web Design Services.
18. Repurpose Your Content
Wherever possible, you need to look for chances to leverage current content and resources. If you have an awesome blog post for your SEO strategy, why not test it on social media? You can do the same for email content.
When applying content in multiple places, you get an effective ROI for content pieces, and get more information and observe how it performs over different channels.
Your hidden pearls of the content may be a little too concealed for audiences. Utilizing content that works, resonates is a reliable plan for trial on social media as well.
19. Study Your Competitors
While you do not need to copy your competition, you still need to be aware of what they’re doing on social media. You can learn from them so you can minimize time on your own learning curve.
Competitive analysis provides you with insight regarding what is working and what is not working for brands similar to yours.
20. Develop a Social Content Calendar
Social media calendars assist you with posting content to appropriate social channels at specified times. It needs to include your strategy for the content mix.
Try to begin with the 80-20 rule where you use 80% of your content for informational, educational or entertainment purposes, and the other 20% is a promotion for your brand or content for selling your products.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why social media often isn’t on the top of the list for small business marketing. This doesn’t mean it is not effective.
Social Media for small business should be among the biggest investments you can make. Whatever the size of your business, social media tool can help you improve your connection with your audience, reach prospects and boost brand awareness.
It does look overwhelming, but as mentioned, you don’t have to do it all. Just keep your approach focused, start small and on two major networks to build your marketing efforts gradually.