10 Ways Small Businesses Can Improve Their Social Media Presence
Businesses around the world, big or small, are aware of the fact that social media has become perhaps the core platform for creating business value. For most small businesses, there hasn’t been enough time or effort put into creating a proper presence on social networks. This is a critical oversight. Every business, regardless of size, needs to maintain a measurable social media presence to capitalize on selected market segments. Frontier recently marketed their Frontier internet plans across multiple social platforms and got a higher response than traditional marketing methods. This is a clear example of how leveraging social media can be beneficial to a business. This blog explores ten ways small businesses can improve and maintain a meaningful social media presence.
Choose the Right Platform
When it comes to social media, always go for quality over quantity. Social media has mushroomed in a big way since Facebook went public. There are thousands of networking sites dedicated to connecting people. With so many options, which platforms should a small business choose? The answer is to choose around four of the best based on where your audience is. It should also be in line with what your goals are on social media. Some of the most popular social media networks today are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn. Out of many platforms, from a small business perspective, most target demographics are found in those mentioned. Choose the ones that allow you to reach your audience best.
Define Your Social Media Goal
Active interaction on social platforms has its benefits. Your social presence can accomplish customer service, engagement, lead generation, audience expansion, sales and web traffic increase among others. But in order to attain measurable success in any of these areas, it is important to define a social media goal. All your strategies are centered around that specific goal and will affect your presence on social media. If you want to boost business sales, your approach would be radically different than if you wanted to improve customer experience. Without a discernable goal, social media activities are just so many shots in the dark. You may get lucky, but not always.
Strategize
Having a social media objective is good, but without a well-constructed strategy, it’s going to be difficult if not impossible to achieve that goal. You need to have a plan to help you get where you want to go. Strategizing may include designating people to be part of your social media team and assigning specific responsibilities to them. This helps keep everyone on the same page and through synergy makes it easier to reach your desired goals. Additionally you will have to set the types and frequency of posts, create a content calendar and manage the same consistently.
Content Creation Planning
Knowing your audience is critical to your success on social media. Use insights and feedback to create, curate and collate content that is relevant to your audience. Instead of promotions, concentrate on getting visibility for original and engaging content to better tap into your audience. Content should always be high quality with emphasis on videos and images more than text, regardless of audience.
Automation
Most small business owners do not have the time to constantly interact on social media. Therefore, it’s a good idea to make use of multi-platform scheduling tools. Software like Hootsuite helps schedule your content in advance, saving you time you for other aspects of business.
Engaging Effectively
Quality notwithstanding, it’s simply not enough to just post content and walk away. Social media is based on interactions, so you should be engaging the audience that responds to content. By commenting on posts, participating in conversations and addressing criticism, you can build relationships with members of your target audience.
Minimize Promotional Activities
Always follow the 80/20 rule when posting. 80% of your content should be audience specific, based on creating engagement and communication. If you’re doing that, the remaining 20% can be promotional content intended to drive social sales. Do not overdo it, because customers on social media are prone to getting annoyed by too many promotional posts.
Constant Presence
While automation certainly reduces time spent on social media, you can’t simply schedule posts and not go online for the whole month. You will still need to spend at least 15 minutes a day to monitor activity on your various platforms. More than half of your audience expects replies to their queries within 24 hours. Any later and you give the undesirable impression of business unconcerned with its customers.
Consistency
It is important that all of your posted content be in the same tone and in line with your brand image. Brand recognition is dependent on consistency and for this reason, it can become an issue if too many people are involved in your content creation process. Its best to limit the number of people posting on your platform so that audiences are presented information in a consistent voice.
Monitor your Progress
Across various platforms, your objectives are the thing keeping your strategies moving in a certain direction. You need to measure the success of these strategies against the information available to you. This determines the metrics that you will be using to evaluate your success. Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and other tools give you actionable information on how measurable the success of any specific strategy is. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling Hughesnet satellite internet, or homemade organic tomato juice, you need these metrics to stay on track.]]>
