How to Use Social Media for Small Business 12 Simple Tips

Social media for small business: When a business is small or just starting, they need as much exposure as possible for growth and popularity. And there is no other platform as potent as social media sites for this purpose. Today, 51% of the world’s population, i.e 3.96 billion people, uses social media.

On average, people spend about 2 hours and 22 minutes on these sites. Moreover, 54% of people who surf social media also use it to research products. In other words, social media has turned out to be the advertising tool with the most extraordinary penetrative power.

For a small business, running an engaging social media profile can do wonders. What big corporations and popular brands do through their investment powers, a small business can do equally well with innovative social media tactics. But to employ the right strategy at the right time and reach the right people, they need a foolproof plan. 

You do not need to be a digital marketing pro to do so. All you need is a little bit of Internet research and the enthusiasm to handle your business’s SMM needs in a cool-headed, customer-centric, and calculated manner. This post should help you take a step in that direction.

How Social Media helps Small Businesses

A small business will not have the money or brainpower to design elaborate marketing campaigns and implement them. While it sounds brutal, the most pragmatic thing to do is collect the crumbs of larger businesses and ride the waves they created. 

When you have social media networks at your fingertips, this should be as easy as pie. Here is how social media can become the biggest cheerleader in your marketing mission.

Branding

Every business needs a hook to stand out in the crowd. What is unique about you? What do you have that the next person does not? What exclusive value can you offer above and beyond your competitors? This distinctive characteristic is what your brand is built on. It is what your customers and prospects will use to identify you even when the name of your business is not mentioned. 

Fast And Easy Communication

You do not have a customer service or sales team, which is on call 24/7 to respond to your existing and prospective customers. Neither is it possible for you to handle all customer queries via phone calls when you are too busy building and managing your business.

Social media sites serve as the perfect medium to interact with your customers in this case. It is easier to respond to messages there while managing your time judiciously and efficiently doing the work of ten agents by yourself. 

Networking And Partnerships

The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about networking and tying up with others for business advantage is going to events and talking people up. But small business owners have little chance of getting invited to events where they have an opportunity to make connections that will be productive for their business. 

Boost Organic Visibility

Paid Internet marketing is costly. It is even more so when you work in a niche that is costly in itself. What is also important to remember here is that not everyone trusts paid ads. Most people feel more comfortable trusting posts and recommendations that reach them organically. 

Increase Website Traffic

Coming up on search engines organically will be severe for small businesses. There are probably more popular brands hogging the top results, or people will not be searching for the exact product you sell because they do not have any idea it exists or need it. It is up to you to plant that seed in their heads so that they can find you and come to your site. 

Tips of Social Media For Small Businesses

The scope for do-overs in a small business is minimal to none. You have to understand that you must have a solid idea about how you want to go about creating and maintaining a social media identity for your business. Running your marketing campaign might sound daunting, but you should have a smooth running with these tips.

Start With A Plan

Many small business owners will make the rookie mistake of hurrying to set up a social profile without having a clear vision of the brand image or marketing plan they are going for. When you do that, you inevitably set yourself up for failure.

Your social media identity starts so disorganized that your customers can hardly make sense of it or identify your posts with your brand. First impressions matter a lot, and if it is messy, chances are, you will never fully recover from that.

Set Social Media Goals And Objectives

The first step is to decide what your goals are when it comes to your business. You must be wise when setting your goals. A lifesaving tip here would be to follow Peter Drucker’s SMART guidelines when setting goals. SMART refers to Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. 

Research The Competition

If you go and set up a similar business or even identical to someone else in your niche and have been there longer, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get your foot in the door.

You need to research the competition you have in the field and decide on a proper USP to pull customers to your business. An excellent place to start is by doing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of your business and market. 

Conduct Social Media Audits

Auditing is essential no matter what the size of your business is. Social media audits let you know how your SMM campaign is working out.

You will be able to find out what is producing the desired effect and what is not, which elements are taking you towards your goals in a feasible manner and satisfactory rate, what changes might be necessary to make the performance of your campaign better, and any security or other issues that you might be facing.

Look For Inspiration

Even the best social media marketer can’t develop novel ideas every day. Everyone needs inspiration now and then, and you are no different. Tweak the latest social media trends and news to be relevant to your brand..

Create A Social Media Calendar

Customers and viewers will only engage regularly with your brand if you post regularly. If you are inconsistent in producing your content, you will not find the engagement you are aiming for since viewers will not know when to expect your posts. By maintaining a calendar, you will be able to keep your posting schedule organized. 

Interesting Read: How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar? (Tips and Templates)

Decide Your Platform

When we talk about being present in social media, it encompasses a large number of platforms. The more places you are present, the more will people find out about you.

Moreover, different social media networks employ other circulation techniques and modes, each of which can be beneficial for your business. It is essential for you to be present on all the major social media sites with the maximum number of active users for full engagement. 

Facebook – To date, Facebook remains the top social media site in the world. The versatility of the site has a lot to do with that. Therefore, make sure you utilize all the options and tools available to you.

YouTube – YouTube is one of the best platforms for inbound marketing. Video product catalogues, tutorials, reviews, sneak peeks, trailers – there is no end to the kind of exciting videos you can put into pulling customers.

Instagram – The appeal of Instagram comes mostly from the instant gratification it can provide. So that is the mood you want to maintain. You can use the site to advertise products, post video reviews of customers, put up teasers, and much more.

Linkedin – While most people identify LinkedIn as a professional site, it can be much more than that. Your first task is obviously to create a prosperous business profile there. But once done, you can post educational, activism-related, or even promotional posts and articles there to attract people.

Pinterest – Being strictly based on images, gifs, and mini-videos, Pinterest works best to advertise your products in categories and show off customer review pictures and posts to motivate prospects to buy from you.

Twitter – Nowadays, people get more reliable information from Twitter than news channels. It is also highly conversational. Thus, if you want to start a conversation, you should get on Twitter.

Reddit – Reddit is another highly conversational social media site, but with a difference. Here, people want to engage in productive discussions, ask for help and opinions, analyze and dissect products, etc.  

Snapchat – While you may be wondering how Snapchat can help with marketing, we want to tell you that it can be a blessing for small businesses. Use it to give glimpses of your daily routine, good reviews, best customers, working tricks, etc. It can help you humanize and mingle with your customers well.

Quora – This is a Q&A site, so it may not seem relevant here at first. But if you read answers to a few questions on the site, you will realize it can be a great way to direct traffic to your site.

By providing useful and productive answers to trending questions and leaving your link there, you can gain tons of interested and curious visitors to your business.

Know Your Audience

The way you approach your marketing depends on your target demographic. But even within your target audience, there will be differences and segregations. The success of your campaign will depend on how well you can target each section. But first, you must find the right people to target. 

Stand Out As A Brand

No one likes to go to vanilla or copycat brands; there is no appeal in that nor do they have anything new to offer. You need to build up a distinctive image and create a bold statement regarding the value you are providing. Explain to your audience how they can get what you offer only from you and why they absolutely cannot do without it. 

Expand Your Audience

Knowing your audience is not enough; if you want to succeed and grow, you must expand your audience. There are several ways to do that.

You can analyze your current audience and find newer attributes that connect them. You can find out other types of products and content that your existing audience is most interested in to find other people who are also interested in those, to target. 

Build Relationships

Customers no longer look at buy-and-sell relationships as strictly transactional. They want meaningful relationships with the sellers that they can gain more than just a product for. That means, you need to interact with your customers on social media.

Make it a point to respond to comments and reviews, tag loyal customers in your posts, show gratitude and appreciation for positive statements, respond with promises to redress and fulfil demands on negative comments, and send messages and do follow-ups to make them feel wanted and cared for.

Strengthen Your Authority

When you first set up your business, it might be challenging to convince people that you have value to provide. It takes a lot of effort and toil to build up your business and its digital presence. People need evidence of your authoritativeness to be able to trust you.

Collaborations with established influencers and brands, references and recommendations, reviews and ratings, and identity verifications are great ways to build up online authority. 

Repurpose Your Content

Even if you are a small business owner without high-end tools and unlimited resources, you will know by now that brands most often post the same content on all the social media sites they are present on.

However, even though they may seem identical, a closer inspection will reveal critical differences. There will be differences in the text, i.e., the caption or description, based on what the audiences on that platform best respond to. 

Share Visuals Whenever You Can

A picture speaks a thousand words is a quote that is all too applicable here. It is easier to register and assimilate visual inputs than textual ones. Using more visuals will ensure that your message will be imprinted in the minds of your audience. 

Focus On – Quality Over Quantity

Have you noticed that if you message-bomb your friend, they will stop talking for a while? The same happens in social media.

If you post too many times without interval enough to internalize and act on the last post, not only will your viewers feel overwhelmed, but they will also forget and confuse your posts with each other. That is something a small business does not want to see. 

Schedule Your Content For More Engagement

There are two significant advantages to scheduling your posts. The first is that it gives you the chance to create your posts in advance and prepare them to be published automatically at the right time, thus freeing up your time for tasks related to your business or social media engagement. 

Social Media Advertising

While there is no substitute for organic results, sometimes you need that extra push. You can get that by using paid social media ads. Paid ads have greater reach and penetration, you can target better through them, and they show up as the top results in searches and explore pages. 

New Opportunities

It is essential to settle down in your business and look to expand to a new product or location. It can be challenging to decide if this latest move will produce the same or greater level of success as before or not.

In that case, what you can do is pinpoint your most successful type of content, most engaged audience type, most sold product, etc., and then try to find why they were the best in their niches. 

Usage of Right Tools

Man cannot replace machines in two scenarios – one is when a lot of data is involved, and two is when you need a microscopic analysis of the data. Both these are applicable in SMM.

Trying to work things out yourself will be no different than throwing stones in the dark. You need right social media management tools to help you with your marketing efforts without needing a marketing team to back you up.

Monitor – Just making a post catered to your audience does not complete the job of the post. Analytical information about how people engage with the centre can provide deep insights into how your viewers engage with you and what they most benefit from.

Listen – When people give you feedback regarding what they want, your job is to listen to them and bring about the changes or additions they want. If you do not show positive results to your prospects and customers’ suggestions, they will start distancing themselves from your brand.

Analytics – No data is useful unless you analyze and process them into usable information. Data analytics can reveal a lot that is invisible to the eye. You can apply analytics to any part of your campaign and utilize the results obtained.

Graphics – Attractive graphics can be challenging to design if you do not have the necessary experience. There are many useful visual and graphic tools that can translate your vision onto the canvas and create stunning ads.

Content Curation – Expecting to find new things to post can be a fallacy. You can use tools to curate and advertise content from relevant areas to publish on your profile.

Monitor to Social Media

Engaging with people on your posts is not the only way to engage in social media. Social listening is also essential.

It refers to finding out whether any conversation about your niche is happening anywhere on social media and participating in the discourse. If you can add value to the discussion, chances are people will research you or follow your link if you drop it there. 

Mobilize your Business On Social Media

Conventional marketing does not need to be the only thing on your social media profile. Customers are always eager to feel like an integral part of your business.

You can give your audience an inside view of the working of your business or creation of your product, ask them for ideas for the next project, let them suggest customizations, and so on. 

Connect With Partners & Collaborators

For a small business, even little acts of support can mean a lot. That means they need to find partners and collaborators to help with expanding their product and service catalogues as well as with marketing. A great way to get two birds with one stone here is to use social media to show off these partnerships and collaborations. 

Track & Analyze Performance

You will never know how well you are doing unless you track your online performance and evaluate each component and activity.

Knowing your KPIs, which ones are relevant for your business, the best values in your niche for your level, and how to improve them is mandatory, even if you are not directly involved in your products’ marketing. They help quantify how well your campaign is working out, and your business is doing. 

Conclusion

The potential that social media holds for the success of your business is second to hardly any other. When harnessed cleverly, it can do more for you than the highest paid social media marketers. If you are a small business owner, you need to get on board today. Use the above simple tips and watch your business blossom and enjoy the benefits of success every brand dreams of.