Social Media Tips for Small Businesses
Sibel Hos
If you’re a small business owner, you’ve already considered using social media to get your products and services out to more people.
If you still haven’t thought about it and you are waiting for customers to find you, don’t wait any longer and take an action.
Why?
Because your competitors are already after your potential customers!
Social Media Tips to Help You Develop Your Business
1. Create a Social Media Plan
If you are already using social media or just starting to use it, you need to create an effective social media plan as you need a specific goal of what you want to achieve and accurate measurements to help you evaluate your efforts.
Some of the strategic activities that you should apply during planning are as follows:
• Define your goals
Being active on social media has many advantages for businesses. You can support your customer service team, interact with your customers, create potential customers and expand your target audience, increase sales or web traffic through your social presence.
However, you must have a goal you can work on in order to succeed in any of these advantages.
For example, if you want to support your customer service team, you can use a tool like Juphy to manage all customer responses and support requests in one place. In this way, you can enable your business to manage the customer support process in the simplest way and you can collect all communication networks in a single point.
• Conduct a competitor analysis
Find out what works and what doesn’t work in social media by focusing on how your competitors manage their social media channels. Then draw yourself a roadmap by using this information to develop your strategy.
• Check your social media accounts
Evaluate the performance of your existing social media accounts. Most experts suggest that it would be better to join the 4 most popular platforms, but you analyse which social media channels are more effective for your business?
Facebook: The social network which has an over 2 billion active monthly users is ideal for businesses looking to generate potential customers and build relationships.
LinkedIn: It can be used by both B2B and B2C businesses to build trust and authority and to attract audiences.
Twitter: Its audience is under the age of 50 and it is perfect for businesses that need to be aware of time-sensitive information such as breaking news, announcements and trending topics.
Pinterest: It is a great platform for businesses with visual appeal and a smart choice for driving sales.
Instagram: Like Pinterest, Instagram is a great platform for businesses with visual appeal. We can also say that Instagram is the most suitable social network for influencer deals.
Once you’ve decided on the social networks you would like to use, be sure to add relevant, interesting and informative details about your company and your services to these profiles. All the visuals you use for your profile picture and overall look should be the same on every platform. Use your business name for all your business pages and make sure to present same name, address and phone number etc. and the Google map location is correct.
• Find out your target audience
Analyze your data about current customers, then use this information to find your ideal buyers.
• Have a content calendar
Creating a content calendar allows you to see in the big picture when and what content you will post on which platform.
2. Avoid Over Publicity
While social media platforms are great places to raise awareness, convey your marketing message, and promote your services, you shouldn’t just talk about yourself on these platforms. Because businesses with a “self-centred’’ approach tend to lose their existing followers as soon as they gain new followers. That’s why you need to maintain a stability in your content.
3. Use the Right Social Media Tools
It takes a lot of time to do tasks on social media manually. Social media tools come into play in this process to avoid wasting time. Social media tools help you automate tasks and processes. While there are many automation tools you can use to schedule your posts for up to a month, it is important to choose the right tools for your business.
4. Use Attractive Images
Use visuals (animations, product videos, live videos, interviews, stories and infographics) in order to increase engagement in your posts. These images help you attract and interact with your target audience.
5. Build Relations with Influencers
Influencers that appeal to your target audience can help you promote your products effectively. For this reason, you can contact an influencer personally or apply to an influencer agency. Agencies can not only help you find the right influencers, but they can also help you strategize, launch and manage your campaigns
6. Track Your Performance
The only way to improve your marketing campaigns is to find out where you went wrong. For this reason, it is important to measure and monitor the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns. Doing so helps you make decisions based on real insights rather than guesswork. This way you can find out what kind of content your audience likes, platforms with the best engagement, conversions, and further information.
Are You Ready To Strengthen Your Social Media Strategy?
Social media should be one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy as a small business owner. It may be difficult for you to deal with social media at first, but you cannot ignore social media.
The tips given above can help you stay one step ahead of the competition. You can use them to improve your presence on social media channels and increase your conversions.
Be proactive, listen to your customers, notify them regarding new developments, especially in times of crisis, provide quality content and regularly monitor your performance on a social media campaign.
