September 27, 2019

Social Media Tips For Small Businesses

Start With A Plan

Every solid business strategy starts with a good plan. Before you dive in and just start posting ask yourself some key questions about why you’re doing it. What are you hoping to accomplish? Are you hoping to increase sales, generate leads or improve customer service? Or alternatively, are you just looking to create a little more visibility for your brand?

Choose The Right Platform

Find out where your audience is. Do not assume where your audience spends their time online. It’s important to do your research and take into consideration your target audience, their preferences, and other demographics before starting to work with a platform. If you are targeting millennials your instinct may tell you to skip Facebook and focus on Snapchat and Instagram, however data shows that 76% percent of millennials still uses Facebook. (Source from Pew Research Center)

It’s important to remember that you can utilize different social media platform channels to reach different audiences or to meet different business goals.

Know Your Audience

If you haven’t defined who the target audience is for your business products or services, then you should start here. Defining your target market is one of a marketers most important tasks. Social media analytics can be a great way of filling in the gaps in your customer analysis. They can also help you understand who’s interacting with your social accounts, even if those people are not yet customers. With this intel you can revisit your social media plan to include ways to reach more people just like them. With this intel create content that offers value to your audience and helps them in a worthy manner, if it’s not then they will avoid reading it. Which will obviously affect the number of social shares and followers you get in the future. Research your intended audience before you make any final decisions about where you will focus your social efforts.

Check Out Your Competition

Once you are aware who is already interacting and engaging with your business and buying your product or services, it’s time to focus on who is engaging with your competitions and analyze what they are doing. How Often do they post? What days of the week and times are they posting? How large is their follower base? And what type of posts get the most engagement? You will quickly begin to see patterns that emerge. These patterns will help you understand whether their efforts are effective.

Create a Posting Schedule

Planning is important. Posting randomly or sporadically are not characteristics of a successful social media strategy. Consistency will heighten anticipation for your content, interest in your business and overall engagement. You’ll need to Figure out what content resonates with your audience, decide on how often to post to each social network and profile and to create or source great content to share. An effective way to share the right kind of content is to use a social media calendar. Having a clear social media calendar allows you to stay accountable, be consistent, save lots of time, get more productive, and achieve peace of mind – all of which contributes to building a results oriented social media marketing approach.

Add Value For your Audiences

Social media marketing requires interaction from both sides. Your customers follow you because they like you and what you have to offer. That doesn’t mean you can just blindly post content, or constantly promote your business and special offers around the clock and expect people to stay interested. They will eventually tune out and engagement will plummet.

Make an effort daily to check your social feeds and see if you need to respond to anyone. Try to acknowledge as many people as possible, answer direct messages quickly, and let your followers know you’re watching. Your fans have other interests, so find content from other sources that caters to those interests.

This could include:

• Relevant industry articles
• Relevant images and memes
• Videos (funny, educational, or instructional)
• Current event and news

Boost Your Post

For as little as $10 you can boost any post on your Facebook page to promote it. This boost helps the content appear and feature in the feeds of your targeted audience. You don’t need a massive budget to get your content in front of hundreds (even thousands) of locals to turn them on to your small business. Boosting the occasional post can help increase your organic reach as engagement rises. To bet the most out of your posts, always include a call to action, telling your audience what action you want them to take (i.e. shares, comments, and like etc.)

In Conclusion

Social media is constantly changing. Whether you have a huge social media following or are just getting started, use these tips to establish your social media marketing strategy. They can help you grow your audience in a way that adds value to them and your business as a whole.