Social Media Strategy for Small Business Growth

Social Media Strategy for Small Business Growth

Today, nearly every American adult use the social media – making it an extremely important part of any business strategy. People are spending more and more time on their phones, and most of that time is spent on social media apps. Also, social media users interact regularly with companies they do business with or are interested in. As a result, not only is social media free, but your potential customers are also there waiting to hear from you.
For small businesses, social media is a powerful platform for connecting directly with an audience to build brand awareness and brand loyalty. In addition, it’s also an effective platform for lead generation. This article explains why your small business need social media and the best way to create an effective social media strategy.

Key Reasons Why Social Media is Good for Small Businesses
Creative Ways to Market Your Small Business on Social Media
Why You Need a Social Media Strategy
How to Create/Design a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Conclusion

Key Reasons Why Social Media is Good for Small Businesses

The use of social media for your business is no longer optional. It’s an indispensable way to gain valuable insights, reach your customers, and grow your business. Years ago, small businesses were skeptical of using social media for marketing. However, they’re now aware that social media is a significant part of their marketing efforts. As a small business owner, you’re leaving money on the table if you’re considering putting an end to your social presence or ignoring social media means of marketing. Here’s why social media is good for your small business.

It remains a valuable communication avenue

Social Media Strategy for Small Business — Social media allows your business to engage with customers in a timely manner

When it comes to all businesses, it’s better to have several methods of communicating with your customer base. Emails, phone calls, and mailing addresses are all helpful, however, social platforms like Twitter and Instagram offer quicker communication avenue. In other words, it allows your business to engage with customers in a timely manner. You don’t have to be on all platforms; however, it’s important to have a few active accounts to communicate with potential and existing customers.

Social platforms like Instagram and Facebook offer great service in helping you aggregate data and define your target market. Most small businesses that are already doing this are aware of its benefits. However, those that think they can ignore or skip out may actually be missing out on potential leads and customers.

As a small business owner, you shouldn’t copy every move that your competitors make. However, you should be mindful of your competitor’s level and what they’re up to. Your competitors have the advantage of being able to increase their reach by engaging with customers actively through social media. Therefore, having active social media profiles will actually do your business a favor by increasing its visibility through search result pages.
As mentioned earlier, your business doesn’t need to be on every social platform to show that you’re active. You just need to use the platforms where your brand’s voice will be at its strongest and engage with your customers.

Creative Ways to Market Your Small Business on Social Media

Are you having a hard time justifying the time spent on social media to your customers or your boss?
If so – then you’re probably not selling the full range social media benefits. People will start paying attention when you show how they can use social media to get ahead of their competition.
Highlighted below are the creative ways to market your small business on social media;

Advertising

Social media advertising can solve a lot of problems for many small businesses. For starters, you may need more targeting options than just keywords and location if you’re not getting good results with paid search advertising. Hence, social media advertising platforms provide more advanced targeting options.

For example, Facebook’s detailed targeting allows you to choose the following:

Interest categories which include entertainment, business, family, fitness, hobbies, sports, technology etc.
Demographic categories which include education, financial, home, life events, parents, politics, relationship, work etc.
Behavior categories which include automotive, B2B, digital activities, charitable donations, media, job role, expats, consumer classification etc.

In addition, you can also target your Facebook ads to those that have visited any page on your website.

Twitter also offers similar ways of targeting audience in their social media advertising platform. This includes targeting people on your email list, people in your customer data, people that visited any page on your website, or other databases owned by your business.

Advertising is definitely an effective way of using social media to market your small business. It enables you quickly reach your social media audience long before you’ve built up your followers organically.

Analytics

Google Analytics is vital for any business. However, social media can dig into the more distinctive side of your business analytics.

While Google Analytics breaks down your website visitor’s gender, age bracket and general interest grouping, Facebook Insights provide even more data ( based on your fan base).

And that’s only just the beginning.

Google Analytics also shows the number of people who viewed your content and how long they stuck around. Meanwhile, Facebook Insights shows how many people liked, loved, and have been wowed by your content.

Branding

Despite the fact that many people use multiple social networks – everyone has their favorite. It’s simply the network you spend the most time on. It might be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or whatever else pops up in the market. Thus, businesses should invest in a wide variety of social networks.

Furthermore, your industry determines the number of social networks you have to invest in. If you own a big brand that targets mobile-loving generations, then congratulations. You probably need to brand yourself on all social networks. This is because you cannot fathom which network might be your customers’ favorite.

Building Community

Irrespective of the type of community you want to build for your small business – social media is the best place to build it. In addition, the best platforms to build communities are Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups.

Highlighted below are the advantages of each in a nutshell:

With Facebook (groups):

Facebook offers you the advantage of over 1 billion active daily users. As a result, most of your members logging in on a daily basis have the opportunity to see and engage with group posts.

Furthermore, Facebook group posts generally get more organic reach than its page post. This makes them one of the best means of reaching your target audience. You can also use it to:

Share files with members
Create secret groups
Tag them in discussions
Use third-party tools to get analytics on your group’s activities.

With LinkedIn (groups):

LinkedIn offers you the advantage of being able to email members of your group (those who haven’t turned off email notifications). Consequently, you would have built a mailing list of thousands of members if you build a LinkedIn group with thousands of members. However, LinkedIn has fewer features and its groups are not as active compared to Facebook groups.

With these conceptions, the types of communities you can build using LinkedIn or Facebook groups include;

Local communities your ideal customers can join.
Interest-based communities your ideal customers can join.
Beta testing communities for your product that early adopters would join.
User support communities for your products that existing customers would join.
Private communities for event attendees

Competitor research

One of the best ways to use social media is to research your competition. This is due to the public nature of social media activities that will work in your favor. Consequently, you can learn a lot about your competitors using both free and paid tools in a short amount of time. For example, you can use the Facebook Audience Insights discussed earlier on your competitors. This will make you learn about their fan’s demographics, likes, dislikes, and any other details.

Content marketing

No matter the type of content you’re creating – you need social media to promote it.

Why?

This is because it’s really pointless to create content when you’re not getting viewers or readers to that content. Therefore, social media offers the best way to promote your content.

Furthermore, if you want your small business to reach beyond its current audience (or you don’t have an audience), you can promote your content through social media advertising platforms by targeting your ideal readers, viewers or listeners.

Customer services

There is a general knowledge that people like to use social media for customer service. This is because people prefer fast communication and social media offers a quicker communication avenue for businesses and their customers.

Furthermore, it’s advisable to offer people multiple options when it comes to contacting your business on social media. For instance, you could allow private messaging and also allow anyone to post to your page in your page settings. These options will hopefully keep complaints off public and offer another way to contact you for customer service issues. Thus, always respond quickly to customers to ensure they stay happy and problems stay private.

Email marketing

It’s essential to build your social media presence; however, you may also consider steering your audience to an avenue you could easily control.

Specifically – your email list.

Fortunately, social media can be used to build an email list. The only thing you need is a lead magnet. You simply need to give something free and appealing to people in exchange for their email addresses.

Why You Need a Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy for your small business outlines how you could use social media to achieve your communication aims, and also the tools and supporting platforms you will use to achieve this. Social media strategy isn’t a detailed plan of action. You’ll also need a plan, however, how do you prioritize the activities for a plan without a clear strategy?
Here are key reasons why small businesses need coherent social media strategy;

According to a Global Web Index study, there are two key factors driving the social web which include:

Mobile – Between 2012 and 2014, people who accessed the internet via mobile increased by 60.3%
Older user adoption – On Facebook, the 45 – 54 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic; while the fastest growing demographic on Twitter since 2012 is the 55 – 64 year age bracket.

As people spend more time on social media, you might think getting involved isn’t justifiable because the space is saturated.

This is a wrong conception!

Creating a social media strategy for your small business helps you use relevant platforms to connect with new and existing customers.

If audience building and engagement is regarded as the first era, the current era is focused on personalization and commerce. As a result, all major social media platforms have invested heavily in advertising to lure marketers with the promise of smart targeting and improved APIs. For example, with the aid of Facebook APIs, marketers can:

Manage their audience data for custom audience targeting
Create ads and campaigns
Run analytics and build custom
Manage campaign assets such as pages, accounts etc.

More than half (51%) of social media users are using several platforms when making purchasing decisions. However, without a clear strategy, how do you know what role to play in your customers’ buying cycles? This is a major reason why you need a social media strategy.

Lack of strategy gives your competitors the advantage

It’s quite uncommon to find a business or company without a social presence today. Also, most of these businesses are increasingly developing clear social strategies aligned with business goals. Thus, you won’t know about your campaigns success if you invest in a social presence without a clear strategy. For example, if you post content on your business website to appear active, how do you know that content is positively contributing to your business? What if it’s actually putting people off your business?

Therefore, you risk wasting resources if your small business ignores social media strategy; meanwhile, savvier competitors are working smarter at engaging customers’ based on clear goals, objectives, and targets.

Social, mobile, and the underlying technology has combined to create an environment in which information can be accessed, used or shared on people’s terms.

Some people rarely read emails or blogs; they prefer Facebook or Instagram as their content streams. This disintermediation of contents shows that you need to figure out the roles of social media in customers’ communication for your business.

Despite being only a subset of your total audience, it’s likely that some customers would want information via a social network. As a result, you need a strategy. Deciding on the best means of connecting with a customer isn’t a tactical decision, it simply require strategic thinking.

Social media can be attributed to several good things including providing a voice to people and groups, and also making information transparent and portable. However, vitriol is not uncommon and it also amplifies the voice of discontent.
Therefore, what will you do if your small business is being verbally attacked on social media?

The truth is, even those with a social media strategy that includes crises response find it hard. So imagine the damage that could be done to your small business if you don’t even have a strategy. This is a risk you shouldn’t take!

How to Create/Design a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Ready to figure out the social media marketing strategy for your small business?
If you don’t know where to start or you’re overwhelmed, then you’re definitely not alone.
That’s why we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide on how to create a social media marketing strategy from scratch.

Establishing your goals and objectives is the first step in creating a winning strategy. This is because you have no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI) without goals.

You must make sure that each of your goals are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

Step 2. Monitor/Track meaningful metrics

It’s quite easy to track vanity metrics like number of followers and likes; however, it is difficult to prove their real value. Hence, you need to focus on things like click-through, engagement, and conversion rates. Furthermore, you may want to track different goals for different networks. For example, if you advertise your small business on Facebook, cost-per-click (CPC) is a common success metric. If you use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, then you should focus on click-through. In summary, your social media goals must align with your overall marketing objectives.

Step 3. Research your target audience

Making assumptions is a dangerous game for small business owners.

And thanks to the sheer wealth of social media analytic tools and demographic data that has ensured you don’t really have to make assumptions anymore. To target customers, you should know things like:

Age
Location
Average income
Industry or typical job title
Interest etc.

Therefore, social media analytics will provide your small business with tons of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, and how they interact with your business on social media. These insights allow you to target your audience better and also refine your strategy.

Know your competitors

You should have a good idea of what your competitors are up to before you start creating content for your business.

Carry out a competitive analysis

A competitive analysis ensures you know your competitors and what they’re doing well (or not so well). Also, you’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry and use it to spot opportunities that will help you set social media targets of your own.

This is another means of keeping an eye on your competitors. You need to make research on your competitor’s account handles, business name, and other relevant keywords on social media. Consequently, you may notice shifts in the way channels are used as you track. Or you might spot a specific campaign that totally bombs (or really hit the mark). Thus, you should use these intel to steer your own social media marketing strategy.

If your small business is already is already active on social media, then it’s advisable to audit the success of your current activities. Consequently, it will help you save time and efforts and also identify low impact channels in the future.

Once you’ve figured out your followers on social media, monitor their activities monthly. Metrics like website referrals, impressions, and reach will help you identify current social media engagement and benchmark improvement.

Furthermore, if you’re thinking of including paid social media activities in your strategy, you need to calculate the current ROI for social media channels.

Sharing great content is important, however, it’s equally essential to have plans for when you’ll share content so as to get the maximum impact. You need to ensure your content calendar accounts for time spent interacting with your audience.

Set your posting schedule

Your social media content calendar is the perfect place to plan all your social media activities – from link sharing and images to videos and blog posts. Basically, it includes both your content and day-to-day postings for social media campaigns.

Work at the right content mix

In order for your post to work in support of your business goals, you must ensure your calendar reflects the mission statement you’ve assign to each social profile.

You could decide that:

55% of content is to drive traffic back to your website
20% of content will be curated via other sources
20% of content is to support lead-generation goals
5% of content will be about your small business culture

In addition, if you’re just starting and you’re unsure of what type of content to post, try the 80 – 20 rule:

80% of your content should educate, inform, or entertain your audience
20% of your content can directly promote your business

Furthermore, you may want to try the social media rule of thirds in your small business. These are highlighted below:

One-third of these content converts readers, generate profits, and promote your business.
Another one-third of these content shares ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry.
The final one-third of these content is strictly for personal interactions with your audience.

Conclusion

Every business regards social media as a very powerful tool. It can enhance relationship, increase your visibility, and establish two-way communication with customers, among several others. As a result, it has become an important platform for all business sizes. However, you must first develop a comprehensive social media communication strategy and then incorporate its best practices towards the implementation of that strategy.
Hopefully, this guide can help your small business effectively, and also successfully derive the maximum benefits from its social media initiatives.

Social Media Strategy for Small Business Growth

Table of Contents

Key Reasons Why Social Media is Good for Small Businesses

It remains a valuable communication avenue