
Social media marketing for small business involves using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote your brand and connect with your target audience. It’s more than just random posts— it requires strategy, time and planning.
Why Use Social Media Marketing?
With 4.9 billion social media users worldwide last year (according to Forbes Magazine), social media marketing is a productive way to connect with your target. This marketing helps with brand recognition. By making regular posts, stories and videos your brand will build an audience. As the audience grows, you naturally increase engagement. And engagement builds brand loyalty. This can ultimately lead to more sales, which is what all small business owners want and need.
Key Components of a Good Strategy
Use an editorial calendar. Figure out what you want to post, when and on which platforms it will work best. Tie in trending topics when possible like holidays and other events in your field. Brainstorm to get ideas for posts. Keep your calendar updated at least four weeks in advance.
Encourage engagement with calls to action. Ask questions of your audience. Always respond to comments, even (and especially) negative ones. If it gets nasty, take it to private messages to resolve the issue. Hopefully, you will get the person to change their original comment to be more positive.
You can create paid ads on social media to get more views. Drive people to what you are posting or direct them to your website or online shop.
Creative Ideas for Marketing Small Business
Content is king and video content is queen. Try to embrace videos. It’s not always easy to get started, but can have a big impact in the long run.
Be authentic. Let people know who you are and what makes you tick. Your authenticity may help gain more of a following.
If you have the opportunity to collaborate with influencers in adjacent fields, that can help. They don’t have to be huge influencers as long as they complement your business and don’t compete with it. You can collaborate with others who are not influencers as well, but people you know and trust in adjacent industries. Together you can help each other with crossover followers.
You can set up shops on several social media platforms so you can sell directly from the platform without the viewer needing to visit a website. This works for both digital and physical products.
Know Your Brand
Keep with your branding. Your website and social media sites should reflect the same color scheme, fonts and other branding. Everything should connect.
Understand the algorithms and what the emphasis is. Should you have a lot of hashtags? No hashtags? Use video? Use text only? All social media sites are different and have different audiences. Make sure you choose platforms that relate to your target. The platforms are constantly changing and you have to change with them to keep up with the competition.
Conclusions
Social media marketing is critical for the brand of any small business. Social media is constantly changing and evolving. You need to keep educating yourself on updates. An editorial calendar organizes your posts. This helps makes sure you have something interesting to post on any given day.