Social Media tips and Strategies for Small Businesses

There are thousands of social media networks but it is suggested to choose four of the most popular ones. So how do you choose the right ones for your business?

Here is a breakdown of 6 of the biggest and most popular social media platforms your target audience might already be using:

• Facebook: largest platform
• LinkedIn: business networking
• Twitter: specialises in immediacy and perfect for businesses who need to share time-sensitive information like breaking news, announcements and trending topics
• Pinterest: photo sharing site, great for driving sales because so many users look to the site to plan purchases
• Instagram: photo feed and stories. Great if your audience is younger and typically shopping from mobile
• YouTube: video-based platform, videos drive more conversion with the right SEO

There are many things you can accomplish with your social media presence, such as generating leads, increasing web traffic, expanding your audience, engaging customers and more.

In order to achieve any measure of success, you must have a goal in mind that you can work towards because you will need to create a strategy to get there. The techniques you use in your social media strategy will be vary depending on the goal you are working towards. For example, a different strategy for driving sales or building customer trust.

Once you know what goal you want to achieve, it’s time to come up with a plan to help you get there. First you want to designate the role of social media management to a person or a group of people on your team. You will want to brief everyone who will managing the social media for your business on your goals and strategy.

It is important to have an outlined plan that includes who your audience is, what platforms content will be published on and what topics and subjects your audience is interested in. In this strategy you should decide how frequent you will post, plan your costs and when and on what platforms content will be published.

The content calendar is a big part of your social media strategy because it will lay out a whole month of content and give you a schedule for each post. Make sure to space your posts out in a way that you aren’t posting too much but always posting a frequent and consistent amount of times per week. It is recommended to post 2 to 3 times per week on each platform, but this will vary on the type of platform. Also just be aware of what days and times you post because you want to post when your audience will see it. For example, if you are trying to reach other businesses then post weekdays and not weekends.

Staying active and present on social media can be very time consuming and takes a lot of dedication. However, there are plenty of automation tools available you can use to automatically publish posts and schedule posts up to a month in advance. These include Hootsuite, Tweet deck, Later, sprout social, buffer and many social media platforms have built-in scheduling. If you already have the content curated you can schedule all of your posts for a month using a couple of automation services like these.

Although the content is the most important on social media, it’s not enough to post your content and walk away. Social media is about engaging with your audience and building a connection. A few social media tips and strategies you can use to engage with your audience are:

• Replying to comments
• Sharing user-generated content
• Addressing complaints and criticisms
• Starting and participating in conversations
• Showing appreciation for customers
• Answering questions
• Sharing relevant information

Social media is ideal for brand building and recognition. This means it’s crucial that every post you make is in line with your brand and image. If you have multiple people assigned to the task of social media management this can be problematic. Everybody will bring their own personality to their posts, so it’s best to limit the number of people responsible for posting. Make sure everybody is on the same page in terms of voice and image you want to present.

Your social media goals will determine the metrics that matter to you, and it’s important to measure these to ensure you’re on the right track with your strategy. There are many resources you can use including; Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, LinkedIn company reports and more. If you want to increase traffic to your site, then you’d want to pay attention to the amount of referral traffic coming from your social networks. Use these social media tips and strategies and check your analytics to monitor your growth and conversion rates.