One of the most important goals of marketing is gaining brand recognition. As the consumers will buy from brands they only recognize. With social media, your product/services are put in front much quickly and easily.
Chasing leads and converting them to prospective customers is as important as retaining the existing ones. Small businesses must strive to maintain and build relationships with their existing customers. If your customers start experiencing poor customer service. It is more likely to undo all the work you’ve put in to ensure your business thrives.
Here, we will be looking at 9 expert social management opinions for small businesses.
Define Your Audience
The first step to a successful social media campaign is getting to know your audience.
However, in order to define your targeted audience, you need to identify and understand your niche/industry to dominate it. Although you may have an understanding of your audience, it’s good to verify.
To get a better understanding of your audience, you can either use data provided on social networks. Or use third-party social media tools.
Prioritize Building Relationship Not Sales
Small business owners must reshape their priorities. Your focus on social media shouldn’t be restricted to making sales alone but building relationships.
Dale Carnegie in his book “How to win friends and influence people” stated that people are not interested in you and me, but themselves. Your audience is not any different. They only care about products/services that can solve their problems. Or help them achieve their goals.
This is why helping people should come before pitching sales. The content you put out should focus on helping prospects and should be valuable to them. Your product should be portrayed in a way that helps people too.
Spending Time On the Right Platform
Instead of spreading too thin across different social media channels. Small businesses must pick 1-2 social platforms where their prospective audience is present. Where their audience spends most of their time.
However, if you are hellbent on being present on every social channel available. You will only wear yourself out. As all social channels are not wired in the same way. You can’t use the same strategy for Twitter and Instagram. Because they are wired differently. Instagram is a more image-focused social media channel than twitter.
Therefore, small businesses should only focus on social channels suitable for their targeted audience.
Humanize Your Brand
Most people do not trust until there is a physical proof on sight that the brand keeps up to its promises. It is important that small businesses humanize their brand to connect with the audience and attract more prospects.
To humanize your brand you’ve got to be able to proffer answers to the following questions:
Do you have a brand value?
How are you embracing these values?
How are you looking out for the interest of your customers/employees?
Do your products/services really deliver all you promised it would?
Creating a human connection with your brand is one of the main benefits of social media in businesses.
Create Social Media Calendar
Creating and sharing quality content on your social media channels is the key to engaging your audience and building followers. But what happens when you run dry of creative ideas? How can you be on point always and consistent with your updates?
Social media calendar is the answer.
A social calendar gives you an overview of the content that needs to be published and what’s next on your schedule.
With a social calendar, you never have to scramble to figure out what to post next. Whenever your marketing team has their hands full. You can rest assured that there are social posts lined up.
Social media calendar saves time and mental energy for other important tasks.
Find the Best Hashtag to Use
Hashtags make it easy to filter digital clutters and focus on the information you really want. They are used on social channels like Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.
With industry-related hashtags, small businesses can reach their targeted audience and associate with their industry. It also makes it easy to identify your product/services.
There is no doubt that for a successful small business social media strategy, hashtags must be employed.
Inspect Your Social Presence
Now that you’ve been running your social media campaign for a while. It’s important that you can determine if you are making progress or not.
Combining Organic With Paid Ads
Instagram is said to generate up 58 to 120 times more than other social channels like Twitter and Facebook. This is a great way to reach your followers organically.
However, just as you can reach your followers organically, paid ads are also a great way to reach a much larger audience.
One mistake small businesses made is pulling one for the other. Once you infuse paid ads into your social media strategy, don’t stop. Your team of social media marketing cannot thrive solely on either organic or paid ads.
Everything Shouldn’t Be About You
Your customers will lose faith and your audience are more likely to get bored. If you are always tooting your own horn. About how great your products are and how your brand is the next big thing.
A successful social media marketing campaign is a bit of giving and take. In exchange for their audience’s money and attention. They want problem-solving products/services and valuable social media content.
Below are some of our expert opinion on contents that are not self-promotional:
- Giveaways
- Behind the scene snaps
- Poll and Quizzes
- Infographics
- How-to guide/tutorials
- Things you find inspiring
Conclusion
The human brain registers and processes visual-rich faster than contents with only texts. When small businesses make the most of memes, images, and artworks, it gives content the potential of having more views and engagements. According to research, a reader remembers up to 65% of a visual-rich content up to 72 hours.
For a successful small business social media strategy, there is a need to prioritize visual-rich among the components that make up their digital marketing strategy. For any inquiries visit https://socialmediamanagerforsmallbusiness.com/
