As a small business owner, you’re always looking for new ways to get your brand on the radar of potential customers. Using social media marketing for small businesses is a great way to engage with current customers as well as attract new ones.
Marketing through social media is easy for small business owners as long as they actively post on social media pages. Some common social media platforms include, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. To effectively use social media for your business, set a schedule to regularly engage with your followers. If a business doesn’t engage with its customers, chances are it won’t have success in social media marketing. Here are 5 social media marketing tips for small businesses.
1. Set Specific Goals
The first step is to set social media marketing goals. Before you start thinking about what you want to achieve, you need a social media audit to see a clear picture of where you stand right now.
A social media audit will help you record all your existing social media accounts and programs in one place. You’ll also get a sense of your current level of performance, which you can use as a baseline as well as suggestions to improve your strategy. You can get a free social media audit here.
Once you get your social media audit, next step is to set clear-cut goals that you can actually achieve within a set period of time. If you haven’t already, start with baby steps. Consistency is the key to social media growth.
2. Create Content for Your Audience
Now that you set your goals, you need to create content with purpose to achieve your goals. Content without a purpose is not effective. You need to consider the goals of your content marketing strategy. Ask yourself what you want your audience to do when they consume your content. Keep in mind, if you don’t know the purpose of your content, the consumer won’t have any idea either.
Produce visually effective and engaging content that serves your purpose. Creative photographs and videos are one of the most effective ways to engage with your audience. You can use Canva’s simplified graphic-design tool website. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts. The tools can be used for both web and print media design and graphics.
If creating content is something you don’t have the time you can contact Studio Nula for creative content services for social media marketing. You can think of Studio Nula as your outsourced social media marketing department providing variety of services from content creation to ad optimization, SEO and much more.
3. Engage With Your Audience
People appreciate brands that are accessible and appreciative of their supporters. Be that kind of brand by engaging at every opportunity with your followers.
Show personal interest by asking them to share their opinions, likes, dislikes, preferences, and so forth. Try to like and respond to every single comment. Be a part of the conversation in the comment section. Make use of more interactive features such as Facebook and Instagram Live. Invite enthusiastic promoters and influencers to submit content and then share it with your audience. There are plenty of ways that you can engage, so make sure that you make the time to do just that. Your followers will thank you for it.
4. Post regularly
You should do your best to build momentum with your posts and keep it going. Consistency is going to be very important if you want to build an audience, because it’s not as simple as asking people to follow you and calling it a day.Don’t be surprised if you start to lose followers due to a lack of regular activity. It happens to many business instagram pages.
Try to set up a schedule which you can work comfortably. It doesn’t have to be very frequent – that’s not the point. Remember you set the goals to achieve. If your followers know when to expect a new post from you, this can change things a lot. You can easily increase the number of likes and other types of interactions you receive on your posts by simply establishing a solid schedule for your posts, and sticking to it.
5. Track your progress
It is not easy to know that you’re moving in the right direction without some stats. There are many meaningful data that can be tracked, and not all of them require advanced technology.
It’s also a good idea to set up something for the longer term, allowing you to track how well you’ve been doing over the months, years and so on. This is not just about improving your performance. It can also give you motivation to keep things going forward, because you’ll always be able to see the huge progress you’ve made behind you.
There are many fine points to address when it comes to social media marketing, and some of them are not immediately obvious. Don’t underestimate the potential of getting help from an experienced professional.
In the end, social media is still unexplored to a large extent. We’re still coming up with new approaches to some of the most common cases in social media, especially on the professional side. And those who get in early enough stand to benefit a lot in the long run, because it will become more and more important to have a good social media presence for your business.
