Top 5 Ways Small Businesses can Leverage Social Media
Social Media can be an overwhelming task for many small business owners to take on. It is time consuming, ever changing and has an algorithm that needs to be fed content consistently in order for your posts to show up on your audience’s feed. So how do you utilize social media without it becoming a full time job? We have a few simple tips and tricks that we have effectively used with small business owners that allow them to see sustainable growth of their social media channels without causing undue stress. Check them out below.
Pick the Right Social Media Platforms
Your small business most likely does not need to have a Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, SnapChat, Twitter (excuse me X.com), email marketing platform and TikTok Channel. Realistically, your business will need to have a robust presence on two to three of these platforms at the most. You can select which platform is best for your business by identifying where your customer is consuming media the most.
For example, you are a small hardware store owner, your consumer is most likely looking at DIY tutorials and your average customer is consistently over the age of 35. Knowing these two components you can assume that your audience is most likely going to be looking for content on blogs, Youtube, Pinterest and Facebook.
Once you have identified the platforms that your audience is on, you need to select the platforms that you can sustainably create content for. We will have more of this later but, to continue our example, a Youtube channel is most likely not going to be a platform that a small hardware store owner is going to be able to maintain, so we can rule that platform out. This leaves us with utilizing blogs, Pinterest and Facebook. These 3 platforms will allow our hardware store owner to leverage and boost traffic to their website, access a younger audience on Pinterest and speak to an older audience on Facebook.
2. Identify Your Specific Audience
It’s likely that you already know who your audience is, afterall, you are a successful business owner who interacts with their customers on a frequent basis. Finding your audience on social media can be a little more challenging. We recommend utilizing hashtags as a way to find your audience and look at what type of content they are looking at. You can use hashtags by searching for the services or products you provide. To continue with our hardware store owner, they know that they sell a large quantity or grills, paint and gardening supplies, so they can search the following hashtags: #bbq, #diypaint #gardening
Extrapolating this to their entire business will help them figure out what hashtags to use on their own posts so they can more accurately reach their customers on social media.
3. Quality is King
In the world of social media, image quality is king. A poor quality image or video can make or break the success of your channel. A quality image is not only more visually appealing to the casual scroller, but it looks more professional. The image and video quality on your social channels should represent how you would present yourself or your store in an interview. Would you come in with wrinkled clothes, unshaved and dirty hair? No, you would iron an outfit and come in as the best version of yourself. Your social media channels should be treated likewise as nicely curated photos that are aesthetically pleasing to look at.
4. Make a Sustainable Posting Schedule
How often should I post to social media? The unfortunate answer to this question is “it depends.” A few factors to consider when considering a posting schedule are:
Clearly identify and define the goals you have for your social media platforms.
Pick a posting cadence that is sustainable for your business.
This is probably the most important aspect of having a successful social media presence. It is very easy to say, I can do 1 post a day, and then become entirely too busy to post a quality post every day. This is why we encourage businesses to take a big picture look at their business and their daily obligations and pick a posting schedule that they can maintain for 6 months or more.
5. Stay Consistent
Consistency is key when it comes to social media posting and why we recommend picking a sustainable posting cadence. The algorithms love seeing that you post frequently and consistently. It shows that you have vested interest in posting to the platform and the algorithm in turn, rewards your consistency by giving your posts more air time. Whether you decide to post once, twice or four plus times a week, make sure that from week to week you can post the same amount of content.
