Social media is the best avenue for small businesses to bring their product and services closer to a much larger audience.
Getting your business on social media doesn’t have to be scary, expensive, and a waste of time when you have the right guidance.
In a moment, we’ll be looking at the complete social media services guide for small business social media services.
Start with a Social Media Plan
Social media channels are very accessible that anyone can just start posting organically for free. Therefore it can be tempting for small businesses to dive in and start posting without any plan in place.
However, like every business plan, infusing social media in any business needs to start with a good plan.
Without any social media in place, small businesses have no clear goal and direction with their social media campaign.
Small businesses should endeavor to come up with a social media plan.
How to start a social media plan
- Setting social media goals and objectives: You should create a social media plan that follows the SMART Framework.
- Make a research on your competitors: Make inquiries into how your competitors are using their social channels. Learning what works for others in your industry will save you time and energy. It will also help you get results within a limited period.
- Create a social media calendar: With a social media calendar. You can post the right content to the right social media channel at the right time.
Identify Your Audience
One of the reasons why social media is so effective for business is that business owners can easily micro-target their audience. But before you can target your audience, you need to identify your audience.
How to identify your audience
- The first thing you need to do is to compile data on your current customers.
- Conduct extensive analysis on social media.
Expand Your Audience
Now that you have a clear picture of who your audience is, it’s time to expand your audience by looking for more people like them. A large audience determines the extent of your reach.
Ways to expand your audience
- Online contest: Giving out incentives is one of the ways you can expand your audience. But it gets cooler when your audience feels like they earn the incentive. An online contest can be in the form of a comment to win, referral to win, fill in the blank contest, or photo contest.
- Visual content: It’s an unarguable fact among social media experts that content with visuals (infographics, videos, images) plays a significant role in attracting audiences on social media.
- Partnering with relevant influencers: Partnering with relevant influencers in your industry is another way you can expand your audience. When they share one of your content, some of their audience might find this content valuable. This might prompt these sets of audiences to follow you on social media.
- Focus on your audience preference
- Make use of hashtags that will enable prospective followers to find you easily.
Choosing Key Social Media Channel
When you are present on every social media channel available, you easily spread your effort too thin. But when you are only present on the 1 or 2 social media channel where your prospects are present. AAnd you concentrate all your effort on these key platforms. You end up getting a bigger return on investment.
How to choose key social media channel
- Examine your options: Examine the features of the users of each social media channel. And make a list of the set of audiences you target.
- Compare with your targeted audience: To find the best fit. Compare the features of the user on social media platforms with the features of your targeted audience.
- Gauge your strength: Now examine the social platforms where you have more affinities and reach the most. And identify your strengths on each social platform.
Ask Your Audience for Advice
When you post social media content that asks questions. It helps increase the level of your engagement, create discussion among your followers in the comment section. And helps you generate constructive feedback on your business from your followers.
The importance of asking your audience for advice
- It also shows your followers that you value their intelligence and input.
- Reaching out to your followers this way unveils your level of transparency.
- It demonstrates the level of trust you have for your followers.
- It strengthens your relationship with your followers.
- When you work with the feedback you receive from your followers, it helps you redefine and rebrand your product/services.
Tracking Your Social Media Performance
Now that a lot of plans have been in place. Small businesses must track their performance on social media so that can keep track of what works and what doesn’t.
With analytics tools, small businesses can have a clear picture of their social media effort and can keep track of any other metric.
Below are some social media analytics tools to help you keep track of your performance on social media:
- Hubspot
- SHIELDApp
- BuzzSumo
- Keyhole
- Google Analytics
- ShortStack
- Hootsuite
- Sendible
- Tailwind
- Iconosquare
- Google Analytics
- Cyfe
- Zoho Social
- Union metrics
Hire a Seasoned Social Media Marketing Manager
By now, you would have figured out that running a successful social media marketing campaign. Is beyond crafting a brilliant sales pitch and being present on every social media platform.
It requires strategic planning and restructuring. It involves testing a lot of strategies out until you find one that works perfectly.
However, as the owner of a small business. You wear many hats in the business. There are a lot of business-related activities that are demanding your attention. It’s going to be very difficult for you to update your social channels regularly. Not to talk coming up with different social media management strategies.
This is why you need to hire a social media manager. Not just any social media manager. Nut one who is an expert in the field.
Small businesses are advised to compare at least 3 social media managers before finally deciding on one. This will help settle for the best social media marketing manager.
However, at Social Media Manager, we help small businesses build a strong social media presence and increase their conversion rate. For any inquiry of our services, please visit: https://socialmediamanagerforsmallbusiness.com/