Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram have given businesses unprecedented opportunities to grow and thrive through the use of Social Media Marketing. This isn’t surprising since 42% of the current global population or 3.4 billion people use social media on a daily basis.

But getting started with social media marketing can be overwhelming – especially for small businesses who have yet to find their company’s brand voice.

Your don’t necessarily need millions of social media followers to build an effective social media presence. It’s not really just about the number of followers you can gather, but rather how you engage with the ones you already have, and provide useful content to draw more followers to your social media channels over time.

Social media is very powerful and effective way of connecting with potential customers, fans of your company’s brand and general followers. If you haven’t yet created a accounts on major social channels that can most effectively reach your company’s target audience, you are missing out on a potentially vast source of customer prospects that are willing and waiting to connect with you.

Consider this: about 63% of customers actually expect businesses to offer customer service through their social accounts and 90% of users use different social platforms to communicate with a brand.

The best part is that social media marketing doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. Here’s how you can easily reach new audiences, create awareness, and drive sales through your social media presence.

Shortlist Platforms According To Your Audience

All networks are not equal – it’s essential to compare the key demographics of top platforms and compare them to your ideal buyer profile and target audience.

To start with, find out where your prospects spend most of their time online; for example, B2B companies should head over to LinkedIn because that is where 80% of all their leads come from.

On the other hand, if Generation Z is the target audience for your brand, know that 71% of them use Snapchat at least six times every day.

It’s perfectly fine to have active profiles across multiple networks, but focus most of your time and efforts on one or two platforms where your target audience is most active.

Set Realistic, Specific Goals

Have a social media plan to back up your online presence and don’t post content without some strategy or reason. In other words, identify your marketing goals and then use social media to achieve them.

Consider this: eMarketer research that studied more than 300 B2B and B2C businesses found that 88% of US companies use their social media for brand awareness and brand building, 64% introduce new offerings via their SM pages, and another 60% acquire new clients online via social media.

Hence, with Social Media Marketing, your objectives could be to:

Increase brand awareness
Reach new fans/audiences/ followers
Provide better customer service
Grow your sales

Balance Your Posts

Every post does not need to be a sales pitch; as such blatant self-promotion can drive your audience away.

Instead, try to balance your posts with the 5:3:2 rule; five posts should be from other relevant sources, three should be content that you’ve created yourself, and two should have a ‘fun’ element to humanize your brand.

It may be a good idea to engage your employees, and other social media advocates of your brand to help your company’s social media reach, and retweeting or sharing your company’s social media posts. This approach is guaranteed to work because 50% of consumers in a survey expressed that seeing user-generated content would increase their chances of buying from an online brand.

Choose and Use Images Wisely

The right visuals can help your audience read and retain information better, form opinions, develop feelings and decide on the appropriate action to take in response to what they see.

When compared to other types of content, videos and images are 41 times more likely to get shared on social media. This is why nearly 80% of marketers deploy visual assets with their social media campaigns – and this has contributed to the growth of videos by 63%, surpassing blogs as an indispensable marketing asset.

Engage with your Audience

The key to Social Media Marketing success is fostering a two-way conversation with your audience, as people appreciate brands that are accessible and responsive to their followers and supporters. This is why it’s crucial to keep your followers engaged by interacting with them through replies, retweets and other forms of follower and customer outreach.

Remember, 57% of consumers reach out to brands via social media because they are looking for answers. Connect with them, answer their queries, have meaningful conversations and they’ll be naturally drawn to your products and services and feel more personally connected to your company.

Focus On Quality Over Quantity

People become followers and fans of a social media page or channel because they like and trust the content on your page.

This is why you have to make sure that your posts are both reliable and relevant to your audience – especially since 86% of all consumers say that they try to only support brands that exhibit authenticity.

So, reach out to your audience, understand them, and then provide quality content that they want to see, and which answer questions they may have, or provide a solution to their specific company needs.

Monitor the Conversations around Your Brand

About 80% of online companies believe that they are exceptionally good at social media customer service. However, you’ll be surprised to know that typically only 8% of their clients and followers agree.

If you want to do social media right, then monitor what people are saying about you on different social media platforms and use this information to respond to them in a respectful and authentic way. A social listening strategy lets you track and analyze online conversations about your brand and the industry at large.

Be Patient

Patience is a critical factor in social media marketing for small businesses; understand that you won’t get tons of followers, likes, comments, and shares overnight.

Building a trustworthy presence can take years, but it’s worth it in the end. Don’t stress or fret about the end-goal on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis; just trust the journey, engage your followers, take care of your clients and keep giving them the quality content and service that they love you for.

Schedule Your Content

Planning your social media activities through a scheduling tool allows you to post consistently, and it will help you manage your presence across multiple networks.

Not only do social media management and scheduling tools save you time, but you can plan your content well in advance and schedule posts for different networks at peak traffic times, and track the results so you can refine and modify your social media marketing strategy.

Track and Refine Your Performance

Keep track of what works and what doesn’t, so you can adjust your efforts and improve your results.

Once you have a baseline of how your strategy is working, use A/B testing to boost your chances of success. Use different hashtags, target unique audiences, and play around with the Call To Action links in your social media posts to get a feel for what your followers appreciate, and most importantly, what they respond to.

In short, the results can help you make minor – or major – tweaks to your Social Media Marketing strategy that can lead to increasingly more effective results over time.

Social Media Tools to Help You Manage Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Here is a list of tools that company’s can use to manage their social media posts.

Conclusion

With over 63% of small businesses gearing up to increase their spending on social media marketing, companies can no longer afford to ignore the impact of Social Media Marketing on company sales and brand management.

You need to create a focused Social Media Marketing Strategy that aligns with your company’s strategic goals and build your social media marketing channels one by one, over time.

380 Web Designs is a WordPress Website Design, WooCommerce Development, SEO and Social Media Marketing Agency. Our designers and developers have years of experience building elegant and responsive WordPress websites. We also specialize in creating WooCommerce solutions for new or established eCommerce companies, and we can help you with your Social Media Marketing efforts here in the Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas area and across the U.S and internationally. We are based in Frisco, Texas.