You may have heard, “If it’s not happening on social media, it’s not happening.” This is especially true for small businesses trying to connect with new customers. However, many small businesses are failing to capitalize on the their true social potential.
Social media marketing is vital to increasing touch points, generating leads, and connecting with new and existing customers in a meaningful way. In fact, one in three online users research brands and products via social media.
If your small business is not social enough, the following four tips for social success can prove valuable.
1. Get To Know Your Audience
This may seem like an obvious tip, but many small businesses are doing social media marketing to the wrong audience, and on the wrong social media networks. This is common and can easily be tweaked for social success.
For instance, if your small business caters to women’s health, and you’re not posting content on Pinterest, you are missing a huge target audience. Why? Over 80 percent of Pinterest users are women.
Getting to know your audience will help you learn their interests, what they need solutions for, questions they have, and what social channels they turn to for information and answers.
A few questions to ask about your small business’ target audience include:
- Where do they live?
- What motivates them to make a purchase?
- What activities do they do?
- Do they see value in products or services like yours?
- What is their income level?
- What are the purchase pain points?
- Do they have a family, or pets?
- Where do they seek answers and information online?
Once you have answered the above questions and more, you can develop a buyer persona specifically for your social media marketing campaigns. For instance, if Mary from Oregon loves to hike with her family, leverage that in your social post for that specific buyer persona.
2. Serve Up Value On Social Media
Adding value to your social media posts is absolutely vital for small business social success. Simply pumping out post after post telling users how great your product is won’t cut it anymore.
But what does adding value mean? To connect with users on social media, make your posts all about them. This is where personalized posts come into play. Tactics like asking about what a user is interested in via a Twitter or Instagram poll is a great way to attract social attention.
Serving up value also includes:
- Sharing tips that your audience will find very useful
- Have a social media strategy highlighting special deals
- Give inspirational stories your audience can connect with
- Ask questions and comment on social media posts
- Join social groups and forums
There are lots of ways to add value, and when you have a small business, you can add even more to the community you serve. For instance, get involved in community events and post it on social media to connect in an even more meaningful way.
3. Have Specific Social Media Marketing Goals
Every small business owner knows the importance of goals. Goals are probably the catalyst behind your current growth and success. The same goes for social media marketing for your small business.
Knowing what you want to achieve for a specific social media campaign can help shape your efforts and the content you’re posting. Different goals for social success could be more followers, engagement, leads, traffic to your website, traffic to your product page, and more.
Setting key goals can help you measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing as well. For example, if you’re running alead generation ad campaign on Facebook, but your not getting the social leads you hoped for, you know something is wrong.
Having measurable datahelps you adjust the ad group, like maybe narrowing in the audience reach by changing location, age range, or interests. If you see results after the tweak, you know that you hit the sweet spot for future lead generation campaigns. Without goals in place, you could be wasting time and money.
4. Most Important . . . Be Consistent!
Consistency is the foundation to any social media marketing effort. If your small business is not posting on social media channels and engaging with followers consistently, you will have a hard time growing your social presence for future profits.
This can be challenging, after all, you have a small business to run. Do the best you can and employ social media scheduling tools to lighten the load. You also never need to do it on your own.
There are top social media marketing agencies at your fingertips that you can lean on for help. In fact, many are pretty cost-effective if you calculate the time it takes you to create, schedule, post, engage, and keep up with your small business’ social networks.
Is Your Small Business Social?
Having a powerful social media presence for your small business should be a priority. It is a valuable asset that can increase brand loyalty and have a positive impact on your bottom line. The above tips are a primer to get you started on a path to social success. What social media marketing tactics work for your small business?