Your Guide to Social Media for Small Businesses
Starting on social media with a small business is a lot like a baby taking its first steps – it’s unfamiliar and unstable from the outset. Made even more difficult with the rocky terrain we find ourselves within the digital landscape. But, with a little patience and a lot of practice we can have your business, metaphorically, walking in no time.
The objective of this resource is to provide small business owners with the knowledge necessary to create a solid social media strategy.
We hope you can use this resource in a plethora of ways – whether you are just brushing up on your social media know how or specifically digging into a particular social media marketing technique, you will walk away from this article with the know how to improve your small business. We have provided a handy structure below to preview all of the topics that will be discussed throughout this article (just in case you cannot wait to find out or would like to skip ahead).
The importance of a social media strategy
- The data
7 tips to ensure social media success
- Understand your demographics
- Choose your platforms with the intention
- Create consistent content
- Promote blog content
- Advertise
- Make your content meaningful
- Conduct competitor research
When it comes to curating a stellar social media, we have you covered! So buckle in.
The importance of a social media strategy
Having a strong social media content strategy is a critical way of marketing your content as a business. We all know the importance of keeping up with our social media profiles but be honest, how many of us actually do it consistently?! Sure, we get inspired now and again but without a solid social media strategy you are setting your small business up for failure.
We get it! For the most part, you are a small team, or perhaps you are even a one-woman or man show. In which case, a huge pat on the back because we can just begin to imagine how many plates at once you are spinning!
Building a strong and loyal community of followers over various platforms is no doubt a challenging feat but certainly possible. We all know that social media has a monumental impact on the kinds of exposure your business receives. You might also be aware that doing well with your small businesses social media has the ability to take your brand to the next level and start being seen by potential customers everywhere! You just need to be armed with the right tactics to create branding success using social media platforms.
It is all well and good to sit here and talk about the necessity of social media but let us take a look at the data to have it really sink in just how crucial this component of your marketing medium is.
7 tips to ensure social media success
In this article we a bringing to you a comprehensive guide featuring 7 practical and effective strategies that you can implement within your small business – today! We promise none of these are overly complicated. We are going to be showing you ways in which you can keep up with all of your social media, create a loyal following of customers and convert leads. You will walk away from this resource equipped with all the necessary information to go ahead with a solid social media strategy. We are going to be covering all of the critical components of social media for small business – from the fundamental building blocks to tried and tested implementation techniques. Each of these techniques proves time and time again to be very achievable and manageable so hold onto your hat as we deep dive into these 7 amazing strategies.
1. Understand your demographics
Okay, so this may seem like a boring technicality but hang with me here because it is seriously crucial for your small business! Understanding your demographics is very important for a number of reasons;
- You learn a lot about who exactly is following you and what their interests might be.
- You now have the educated insight into what it is that your customers want most.
- Looking at which posts perform best on your social media profiles informs what types of content you should try to create more of as part of your social media strategy.
- Key pieces of information about your business are revealed to you. Not only do you learn where your primary audience comes geography wise but you can also see the gender and age of those who follow you and engage in your content.
- For example, if you find that your kitchen renovation company primarily reaches an audience of females between 30-40 then you might want to look at promoting ‘forever homes’ or ‘ways to keep your family safe around the house’.
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Choose your platforms with the intention
If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one. Use your recently acquired understanding of your demographics to choose your platforms carefully! Conduct thorough market research to identify exactly where your audience resides. It might be Twitter or perhaps you are in the construction industry and Houzz is your best option instead. Unfortunately, as a small business, you are not equipped with unlimited resources or endless hours to be spent updating numerous social media platforms. It is a much better idea to get clear on what platforms the people you want to connect with are on.
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Create consistent content
Posting consistent content a great way of increasing your number of followers and keeping your existing audience satisfied! Not only that but creating consistent content on your chosen social media platforms means working in with the existing algorithms of the social media. For the most part, if you post regularly and consistently your profile, images, posts, and updates are much more likely to be distributed properly to your intended audience. The algorithms like fresh content and if you upload once a month, not only are you getting pushed into your followers feeds less but you have an even lowered chance of showing up AT ALL. How crazy is that?! All your effort creating a killer social media post, all for it to be seen by a very limited number of people. So ensure that consistency is part of your social media strategy for small business.
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Promote blog content
Social media is a fantastic platform to promote your products, but something even more efficient to focus on is promoting your blog content! It goes without being said that content is king and you should be regularly updating your website’s blog content! Take it to the next level and start promoting your blog content through your social media platforms for maximum results. Some benefits of following this marketing method include:
- You are providing value to the customer by driving them to useful and helpful content pieces on your website.
- Leveraging your social media audience to bring traffic to your blog will assist in gaining higher organic web traffic.
- This web traffic will more effectively drive sales and convert deals in the pipeline due to the customer buy-in that comes from viewing helpful content.
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Advertise
Facebook advertising is an amazing social media marketing tool to get behind! With over 5 new profiles created on Facebook every single second, the audience on the platform is only growing! This is a similar story across most social platforms, with increased opt-in across the board. As of the start of 2019, there are 3.397 billion users who are active on social media profiles.
However, the average social media user has about 5 and a half social media accounts, proving that being on multiple platforms is important. Although you don’t want to spread yourself too thin, as we established earlier when we discussed choosing your platforms with intention, it is important to be where your intended demographic is. This might mean picking 3 social media profiles to do extremely well as a nice middle group. So, when it comes to advertising options other than Facebook you are spoilt for choice. But with over 300 million photo uploads per day, cutting through and standing out from the crowd can prove extremely difficult.
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Make your content meaningful
In order for your content to get the intended response from your potential customer and impact your audience, you must consciously curate meaningful content. This means stopping every once in a while, standing back and looking at what kinds of post you are putting up from a bigger picture. Ask yourself questions like;
- Does this content inspire my intended demographic of people?
- What is the purpose of this content? What am I trying to achieve?
- How might this resonate and who might this content strike in particular?
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Conduct competitor research
Are your competitors providing better value propositions to your customers? Do not forget that you are within a competitive landscape and if a similar company is offering much more than you in terms of useful content or helpful solutions, then it is likely that you will lose the customer. Gain a comprehensive understanding of the market within which you operate and stick to your strengths within the playing field to score goals as a small business.
We hope that this resource has proved helpful in providing you with solid strategies to solidify your social media plans. Social media is an integral part of the marketing mix for small businesses and you now have the know-how! You just need to be armed with the right tactics to create branding success using social media platforms. Use any or all of the above tactics and you will be on the road to success in no time, smashing those social media goals!
