For small businesses, it’s very crucial to opt for a marketing channel that gives the best outcomes using the most practical resources. These days, many businesses favour social media marketing when compared to the other marketing strategies. Well, social media marketing for small business certainly deserves the recognition it gets for its ability to increase the brand’s sales and reach, which in turn expands the professional network.
If you are not sure how to use this marketing channel, here are few smart tips for social media marketing for small business.
#1 Choose the Right Channels
If you’re looking forward to use social media marketing for small business, there are plenty of channels out there, including the popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Your business need not be a part of all the social media channels available.
Assess the needs of your business and find out which channel will best suit the requirements. For instance, Pinterest and Instagram are ideal for visual businesses with access to plenty of photography or products. Twitter and Instagram are perfect for businesses, which generate plenty of editorial content.
Opt to go live on some of the most suitable social media channels and ensure that your business is active on the specific channels. It’s generally advised to commit to just one or two networks. With the right approach, social media marketing for small business can give out amazing results.
#2 Decide Your Target Audience
You might be wondering how target audience matter when we talk about social media marketing for small business. But, they play a very important role here. When you want to decide which social networking platform is the right one for your business, knowing your target audience helps in making the right decision.
To explain with examples, teenagers are all about SnapChat, Vine, Instagram, Tumblr, and YouTube. The young parents and the elderly gravitate towards Facebook. Businesses rule LinkedIn. Bloggers and influencers love Tumblr and Twitter. Now that explains why it’s important to decide your target audience before choosing a social networking channel. If you know which social networking channel your target audience use mainly, it’s easier for you to take a call.
#3 Focus on Community
Experts have proved that social media marketing for small business can widen its reach and create many fans by engaging more audience. However, it is not like conventional advertising where you post a message and expect someone to respond to it. It’s more focused around the concept of community and more conversational.
Social media marketing for small business allows them to directly interact with their customers and so it has the potential to convert those few customers into an effective virtual marketing team. On social media, ensure that you reply to those who communicate with you. Engage yourself with powerful social influencers like individuals with strong followings or the owners of blogs that your customers read.
Keeping your online community of followers engaged is crucial to social media and this in turn is the key to your success on this platform.
#4 Repeat Strategies That Were Successful Earlier
Every business is unique and so there some unique social media aspects that may work well for one business, but not for the other. If your small business has been exploiting social media marketing for quite some time, you might get to hit upon some strategies that have been really profitable for your business. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, repeat the successful social media strategies and reap the benefits.
Social media is a unique marketing tool in that it can enhance the visibility of a company, expand reach, and engage prospective, existing and future customers. It’s just that you have to use the right strategies in social media marketing for small business.
#5 Post Regularly and Stay Active
The importance of regularity cannot be stressed enough when it comes to social media marketing for small business. If you happen to disappear for weeks or even days together for that matter without updating your business’ social media profiles, your customers and followers will forget you. That doesn’t mean you’ve to be active 24/7, but you just need to ensure that you spend some valuable time to update the profile. If you’re busy, you can schedule future updates using the many tools available.
One thing to remember here is that you cannot post anything and everything just to be active, but rather do your research and update your profile with quality posts rather than quantity. So, the thumb rule here is to post good quality updates on your business profile regularly and remain active.
#6 Monitor the Results and Measure Them
What’s the use of social media marketing for small business if you are not able to monitor and measure what the outcomes of your efforts are? This is important because you need to know whether or not your strategies are working out.
Generally, it takes around three months to find out if it’s worthy to spend on your existing strategies. There are several tools that can help you in measuring how successful your presence on social media is. That does not mean you have to rely only on the numbers in the long term, but rather also focus on the quality of content.
With the right strategies followed, your social media marketing for small business success are sure to yield good results. You’ll realise this only when you monitor the results and measure the outputs in reality.
#7 Consider Advertising
If you are ready to invest a little bit of money, you can consider advertising as this can give great benefits for social media marketing for small business. Invest some funds in Google Adwords as this can bump your site to the top few positions of search engine results. For this, you will require a defined listing of keywords, which represent you. You can find such keywords often on your website. Consider both these if you wish to get the best out of your investment.
You can intensify your message on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You can build highly targeted, specific advertisements on the networks with only few clicks. Get to know your audience as this can help you in promoting posts easily, sharing offers, gaining more followers, and driving website traffic.
#8 Share the Links Repeatedly with Your Social Presences
If you develop it, it doesn’t come. Use the clickable social icons, user names or vanity links on your home page, email signatures, business cards, marketing tools, and any other place where you think you can use it. If you are not able to get the world to know how to find you, there’s no use setting up a social networking page.
Perform a Google search to find free social networking icons or you can also consider purchasing a fancy icon package. Never underestimate the power of using social networking icons everywhere you can as this is how you can let people learn about your business.
#9 Start Networking
If you want to win at social media, you first need to be its user. In social media, the good news is that you can steal from others – this is called sharing and you need to do that often. Share someone else’s posts with the hope that they will also share yours. When your post is shared by someone else, it means their followers also get to know about you.
Spend some time daily to read your feeds. Follow experts, influencers, brands, publications, and marketers in your industry actively. Like their updates, share their articles, retweet their posts or link to their articles. This way, you are likely to move ahead in a positive direction in the world of social media marketing for small business.
#10 Dive Deep and Not Broad
As far as social media is concerned, it’s important that businesses dive deep and not broad. As the saying ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ goes, it’s important that you don’t dip a finger in all the social media channels. Rather, master just one or two channels rather than floundering in many.
When you consider social media marketing for small business, a good model is to differentiate between social networking sites and social platforms. Social platforms are similar to soap boxes. They let you to establish your credibility and expertise and give a method for discussion and feedback. Good examples are SlideShare and YouTube. On the other hand, social networks are similar to real-world networking event. Good instances are Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
The above listed tips, when implemented judiciously, can be the right ones to get the most out of your social media marketing for small business. A few months down the lane when you monitor the results and measure them, you can see that your business has gained a lot due to your prudent efforts.
Leave a Reply