With more and more small businesses prioritizing their online presence, social media can prove to be a game-changer. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter are huge if you know how to correctly strategize your marketing efforts.
Worldwide, 47% of internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 spent more time on social media in 2020 than in 2019. And these people are not simply checking out random stuff; they are the driving force behind all online sales. This emphasizes the importance of social media for small businesses.
That being said, because social media sites roll out new features frequently, it can be difficult for small businesses to stay in the know.
Let us get into the crux of what social media has in store for small businesses.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing involves implementing tactics through social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., to pivot business growth through visibility and customer interaction.
You can greatly improve your online presence—and your local presence—by creating a strong user base on social media platforms. You will need to run marketing campaigns on social sites, interact with the current set of users, and promote a business ethos that creates long-lasting connections with the social media community.
The core pillars of social media marketing are as follows:
- Strategy: It includes establishing the business’ objectives, the social channels to utilize for business communication, and the type of content to post on those channels.
- Analytics and reporting: These are important elements that empower marketers by providing visibility into reach, engagement, and various crucial metrics like clicks, views, etc.
- Listing and engagement: This refers to the process of monitoring engagement, collecting data from users, and determining what they have to say about your brand.
- Advertising: Leverage ads on social media sites such as Facebook that help increase your brand’s reach via sponsored posts aimed at the right demographic to reach relevant audiences.
- Planning and publishing: Creating content and scheduling posts that follow established best practices based on historical data and fresh insights.
Why Small Businesses Should Use Social Media
Create Better Brand Awareness
This involves getting your name out to the public. Avoid posting promotional messages exclusively to build genuine and enduring brand recognition. Rather than that, prioritize content that reflects your brand’s personality and beliefs. If you need some help creating brand awareness, advertise your current customer testimonials with this free Review Graphics Generator.
Drive More Sales
Whether that’s online, in-store, or directly via your social networks, followers do not make a purchase decision by fluke. For instance, are you concerned about informing your customers about new products?
Also, what about promoting it for social media users? Integrate your product catalog with your social media accounts and keep your audience informed to increase sales.
Increase Your Audience Base
Expanding your audience will need to identify the most important discussions around your company and sector. Sifting through your social networks is almost difficult without tracking key phrases, hashtags, and user comments.
Keeping an eye on these factors enables you to significantly accelerate the growth of your primary audience and reach more relevant prospective customers to increase your market share.
Keeping it Community-Driven
According to Sprout Index research, 46% of customers believe firms that invest in building a community are the best ones on social media. Therefore, it is ideal to try new methods to engage your existing followers and drive in more audiences with relevant content that connects.
It requires a degree of experimentation with message and content. For instance, does your brand encourage the adoption of user-generated data and hashtags? Even something as basic as posing a question may boost your engagement rate. If you provide your social media followers with something to act on, you will keep gauging their interest based on their enthusiasm and inputs.
Best Social Media Platforms for Small Businesses
When it comes to social media marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so it’s essential to do some prior research before implementing any strategies. Additionally, different platforms should be utilized depending on the nature of your business and the products or services you offer. Here are some popular social media platforms you might consider adding to your marketing plan.
1. Facebook
With over 2.9 billion active users, Facebook remains a top choice for local business marketing. It offers a range of advertising options, including targeted ads based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. It is ideal for businesses that cater to older demographics and offer products or services that require a personal touch or emotional connection.
2. Instagram
Instagram’s visual nature makes it ideal for businesses that rely on visuals to showcase their products or services. This social platform presents an opportunity to wow your customers. Whether it’s high-quality photos or creative videos, Instagram offers small businesses the perfect platform to highlight their brand’s visual story. Additionally, Instagram offers a shoppable feature that allows businesses to link products directly to their pages, making it easier for customers to make purchases.
3. Twitter
Twitter is an excellent platform for small businesses that seek to build and engage with their audience quickly. Its fast-paced nature means that businesses can communicate with their followers in real time and keep them updated on any news or promotions. It’s also a perfect platform for businesses that offer services or products targeting younger demographics.
4. TikTok
TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms with well over a billion active users worldwide. It is ideal for businesses that cater to younger audiences and offers an opportunity to showcase user-generated content. With its algorithm that tailors content to individual user interests, it presents small businesses with an excellent opportunity to reach new audiences and build brand awareness.
5. YouTube
YouTube offers small businesses a chance to create long-form videos that showcase their products or services. It is ideal for businesses that want to build a strong online presence and offer educational or informative videos that can help customers make informed decisions. Additionally, it’s an excellent platform for businesses that want to showcase how their products or services work through product demos and tutorials.
8 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
People usually choose a small, local business over a well-known brand since they appreciate the customized experience and distinctive identity. You need to stay prepared for the changes to come in 2022 and focus on leveraging social media to define your brand persona. Ultimately, it boils down to providing more value to your users and extending your business reach over social media to understand customers better while simultaneously expanding your business.
Check out some of the key ways you can unlock the business growth with the right social media strategies targeting to deliver results
1. Research your Target Audience
Only 55% of marketers use social data to understand their target audience better. As a result, it leaves a huge opportunity for practitioners and professionals to leverage social media data to identify prospective followers. Much of the information you need to drive your social marketing strategy already exists.
All you need to do is know where to search. One way is to adopt the right set of social intelligence tools, and you would not need professional market analysis or data science expertise.
Remember: different platforms attract different audiences.
Consider the demographics of today’s social media users. These figures indicate the networks your brand should target and the kind of content it should produce. The following are some critical lessons for your social media marketing plan in 2022:
- Facebook and YouTube are both popular advertising platforms, owing to their high-earning user bases.
- Instagram and YouTube are the top social networks for Millennials and Gen Z, indicating the strength of bold, eye-catching content that oozes personality.
- Women make up the vast majority on Pinterest, which is noted to have the highest purchases for social shoppers.
Avoid overstretching yourself and instead pivot efforts on networks where your possible audience is hanging out and driving some engagement.
2. Identify Social Benchmarks
Creating your social media marketing campaign requires a careful approach as you’d want to avoid overspending and wasting resources. Setting up benchmarks for your social media marketing enables you to identify key areas by evaluating historical data that contextualizes audience behavior instead of playing it by ear and eyeballing for estimates.
As mentioned earlier, you can be in that 55% of social media marketers drive data-backed decisions right from benchmarking to measuring results.
For instance, you can refer to Page Insights by Facebook, which helps you create brand awareness through targeted social media strategies anchored on a data-driven approach. Having clearly defined benchmarks helps improve your marketing efforts, so you have a starting point for your campaign, corresponding milestones to hit, and targets to achieve.
3. Create a Brand Personality
Your fans on social media come for your goods and services; they remain for your style and substance. Consider your social media as an extension of your voice, tone, and personality of the brand.
Ensure you emphasize the following while developing your brand persona:
- What is your tone? (Comic, fun, serious, educational, authoritative, etc.)
- Outside of your business, what are your primary interests?
- What are the values that your brand wants to communicate?
- Who are your acquaintances? (Other companies or individuals you support, local businesses, etc.)
Make your brand’s character a part of your social media marketing standards, and let your postings reflect your distinct personality.
4. Create Videos
The consumption of live video has increased by 55% in 2021 as marketers believe that video is one of the most useful forms of content for accomplishing social objectives. Social video is exploding with apps like TikTok and new feature additions like Instagram Reels.
Due to their high engagement rate, both long-form and short-form video creations remain dominant in the social arena across all channels. 87% of marketers agree that video provides a positive return on investment.
If you are planning to drive social media growth in 2022, video should be your priority. Doing so will help your audience know better about your business while leveraging platforms for creating a robust brand identity.
5. Utilize Live Streams, Stories, and Podcasts
According to published statistics, 20% of people listened to podcasts every week during 2020, and 32% discovered new podcasts via word-of-mouth or internet research. Getting new listeners and other podcast producers is possible if you strategically promote your podcast on social media, such as by adding to conversations happening in and around your topic.
Moreover, many social media apps offer space to go live — Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn. You can stream live videos and podcasts within clicks. But ultimately, your social media marketing must match your consumer persona and company objectives if you want to get the most out of your social media efforts.
6. Look for Trends
If you’re not making an effort to stay relevant on social media, your organic efforts won’t succeed. One of the ways to ensure you remain relevant is by continuously looking for and following trends. Following trends enables small businesses to capitalize on what their target audience is interested in and tailor their social media content to match these interests. This practice fosters audience engagement while simultaneously increasing brand relevance and awareness.
To stay current on the latest trends, monitor social media platforms, follow influencers in your industry, and seek out industry-related hashtags. Keep in mind, though, that not every trend will make sense for your business to try. It’s crucial to consider which trends align with your brand, voice, and overall messaging to avoid pushing your core audience away.
7. Schedule Posts
Scheduling social media posts can be a game-changer for your business. It ensures that your content is consistently reaching your audience even when your team may not be available. Plus, it frees up more time for your team to focus on other business initiatives.
Some reputable social media scheduling tools you might consider using are Hootsuite and Buffer. Hootsuite provides a simple yet robust platform to schedule across multiple social media platforms, while Buffer serves up analytics to improve performance while allowing for efficient scheduling. The beauty of both tools is that they enable small businesses to streamline their social media efforts for optimal results.
8. Integrate Google Business Profile with Social Media Channels
You can create social profiles for local businesses by telling Google about your social media accounts. To do this, you must include Structured Schema Data into the website for your business that is connected to your Google Business Profile.
One way to drive relevant traffic on your social media through local Google search is to keep your Google Business Profile updated with the correct name, address, and phone number (NAP) of your local business. The same applies to your Facebook page. You need to ensure you’re driving relevant reviews on Google Business Profile and Facebook, as 93% of customers read online reviews before buying a product.
They won’t visit your website if the reviews are not impressive. It is always better to ask for a review and share a Google review link to simplify the review process so customers do not need to manually search for your business on Google Maps.
Once you are ready to implement the strategies to target key social media growth, focus on achieving results that matter the most. In this manner, you may prioritize actions that contribute to the success of your social media marketing plan rather than setting too many objectives that become annoying. Choose one or two and build your team around them.
Social Media Management Tips
If you want to make the most out of your social media efforts, you’ll need to keep a few tips in mind. We’ve got you covered.
Consider the Best Time to Post
Posting at the right time is key for ensuring your content reaches as many people as possible—you want to make sure you’re posting when your audience is most active on social media. This means taking into account factors such as time zone, your audience’s social media habits, and the type of content you’re sharing. For example, if you want to post a video, you’ll want to choose a time when your audience is most likely to have a few minutes to watch it. Likewise, if you want to promote a sale, choose a time when your audience is most likely to be online and looking for deals.
Manage Social Media Ads
Social media ads are a great tool to help you reach a larger audience and promote your products or services. However, managing these ads can be time-consuming and complicated. Luckily, there are many tools and resources available to help you manage your social media ads. For example, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to create and track your ads, or Instagram Insights to analyze your engagement and reach.
Create a Content Marketing Calendar
When you’re pumping out lots of content, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. Creating a content marketing calendar is a great way to stay organized and ensure that you’re consistently posting quality content on your social media platforms. A content marketing calendar also allows you to plan out your posts in advance, so you can ensure that you’re hitting all the key themes and messages you want to convey. You can even use this calendar to track important dates, such as holidays or events relevant to your business.
Social Media Management Tools
Keeping track of your social media marketing efforts is not always an easy task. Thankfully, there are some social media management tools that can help you easily measure some key metrics, such as clicks, likes, shares, and engagement rates.
- Hootsuite lets you schedule posts in advance for your social media channels and analyze data-driven insights to make informed decisions about your content. It’s perfect for a small business that doesn’t have the time to manage multiple social media accounts.
- Buffer easily integrates with multiple social media channels, allowing you to create, schedule, and analyze your social media posts from one dashboard. Plus, its social media analytics feature lets you track post engagement, follower growth, and page views, keeping you up-to-date with your social media performance.
- Sprout Social is another leading social media management tool that offers a wide range of features for small businesses. It lets you schedule and publish posts, track your social media analytics, and engage with your audience by providing easy-to-use tools for customer service and social listening.
- Facebook Insights provides comprehensive analytics that let you evaluate the performance of your Facebook business page. You can see how many people engage with your posts, learn which content is resonating with your audience, and track your page’s overall performance.
While you don’t necessarily need to invest in any social media management tools, they can certainly help you streamline your processes and get the best results possible.
Take Your Online Presence to the Next Level
It is just now enough to be present on social media platforms for the sake of it. Drive conversations, create a community, and implement strategies that deliver results. Social media for any small company depends a lot on honesty and consistency; therefore, start taking baby steps.
Start with creating a solid set of objectives and follow through on each by implementing the right tools and methods that let you stay ahead of the curve.
And as you dive into the world of social media and start to think more and more about your online presence, be sure to consider how tools like Podium can help.
Podium helps small businesses like yours manage their online reputation, increase their volume and quality of reviews, keep track of customer interactions, and more. Ready to give it a try? Start a free 14-day trial to see what Podium can do for your business.
