When it comes to small businesses trying to make it online, social media marketing is non-negotiable. How do you get your potential audience to find you?
Do you just assume that they’ll know where to look? While you might have already been able to establish your business to a point, putting social media marketing to the back of your mind is a big mistake.
If you don’t have the right social media marketing strategy for your business to grow online, you’re not going to get anywhere. Let’s talk about some of the best social media marketing tips for small businesses in the online world.
1. Have Multiple Social Media Pages
Which social media platforms do you currently have your business on? Facebook? What about Twitter, or Instagram? If the answer is no, then you might want to consider changing this. While having a Facebook business page is a great start; it’s simply not going to be enough to get the kind of audience you want.
While Facebook currently has 1.5 billion users, other social media channels like LinkedIn and Instagram aren’t too far behind. We see the writing on the wall and know that the more presence you have on social media in general, the better you’ll do.
Generally, having multiple social media pages for your small business comes with several benefits. It can be an excellent method of driving more business, engaging with a wide range of audiences, and providing another means of contact for your prospects. In addition, when your business has several social media pages, you’d be able to tailor and constantly refine your content and get the most out of your overall digital marketing strategy.
2. Know Your Marketing Goals
Being persistent is one thing, but having clear goals in mind for your social media growth is another – and more effective – way to approach your online brand. Before you start posting content every day, you need to come up with a realistic set of social media marketing goals.
There are many reasons to use social media to promote your brand. From customer engagement to brand awareness, and even increasing your customer service, there are a lot of different angles to approach it from.
For instance, if you want to boost your business’s visibility, promote your brand, and increase customer engagement, you can utilize video-sharing social media platforms. This is because, unlike the written form of content, videos are generally easy to digest, more appealing to the online community, and efficient.
So, to strengthen your social media marketing strategy through video content, you need to have engaging, useful, and timely video pieces. And in cases wherein you need assistance, you can work with a video production team in your area to create professional video content for your small businesses.With those things being said, it’s important for business owners to define their marketing goals to attain a desirable outcome. Once you decide why you’re going to post on social media, it’s going to be a lot easier to come up with regular content and make the most out of these sites for marketing purposes.
3. Be Regular with Content
Speaking of regular content, it’s pretty crucial that you are consistent with the content that you put out there for the world to see. Once you create another social media page for your brand, you’ve got to make sure that this account is active and growing every day.
If someone comes across your page and sees that you haven’t posted anything new for a month, they’re not really likely to start following you. Plus, the people that are already following you will be keen to keep seeing stuff. Otherwise, they’ll start to lose interest and look for other businesses to follow. So, to make sure you have regular content on your social media pages, come up with a content calendar to schedule your posts. Doing so allows you to post content more consistently, thereby helping your small business build a strong social media presence.
4. Give Your Audience a Reason to Come Back
It’s all very well getting someone new to follow you, but if you don’t give them a good enough reason to hang around, it won’t be long before they drop off again and lose interest completely. In order for you to have a successful engagement strategy for your audience, you need to have an already well-established community.
This means that once you’ve put the hard yards in, it will be a lot easier to convert those followers that you have into customers that keep coming back to your product or service.
5. Consider Using an Automation Tool
Everything else on this list requires a lot of your time and effort, and while there’s nothing wrong with this, making it big with your brand online can also involve some time-savers, too. One way to save time on your engagement strategy is to implement an automation tool.
An automation tool can save you hiring someone to manage your social media accounts. It can also help you do things like schedule content in advance and automatically interact with potential followers.
This way, you can continue to grow your brand in other ways, too, without your online presence taking over completely.
Rather than having to check in on every platform constantly, you can outsource this aspect so that it runs a bit smoother.
Final Thoughts
So, despite there being many different small business industries and sectors that your brand could fall into, as described here by Salesforce, social media marketing remains the same for all of them.
The same rules apply, which means that as long as you stick to the tips you see to create a coherent, applicable social media marketing strategy, you should be able to make a real difference with your brand’s online presence.
It won’t happen overnight, but as long as you put some real time and effort into it every day like you would any other aspect of your brand, you will gradually see growth and real, tangible results.
