10 Social Media Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

Oct 9, 2018 10 min read

Social media has become immensely important for any business be it a small business or a large enterprise. Everybody wants to acquire new customers & leads using social media platforms.

According to a survey, 32% of small businesses invest in social media marketing.

Every small business owner wants to market their business online, but most of them start promoting their business on social media without a strong strategy or plan. Thus, today, we will discuss the top 10 social media marketing tips that'd help you to grow your small business on social media.

10 social media marketing tips for your small business

Social media plays a vital role in bringing revenue for a small business. However, due to lack of knowledge, a lot of small businesses fail to properly utilize social channels. Hence, if you are serious to promote your small business on social media, then you should apply these social media marketing tips in your small business.

  1. Understand why you must grow your business on social media
  2. Identify your buyer persona and target audience
  3. Determine the social media goals for your business
  4. Connect with like-minded businesses on social media
  5. Stay active on social media
  6. Find leads on social media
  7. Creating a social media calendar
  8. Which is the best social media platform for my business
  9. Using the right tools to grow your business on social media
  10. Monitoring and measuring the metrics

1. Understand the purpose of growing your business on social media

Understand the purpose of growing your business on social media

Jumpstarting on Social Media can be a bit confusing, there are many ways to get started. If you know the right purpose then obviously the things are going to settle down for you — away from complications.

Social Media can help your small business in:

  • Building your brand reputation.
  • Creating your audience base.
  • Connecting with right professionals.
  • Altering your marketing approach.
  • Sharing your best content.
  • Implementing new social media strategy.
  • Reaching out to a large number of people in less time.
  • Driving traffic to your website or blog.

And the list goes on…

You need to first set up social media goals for your small business and then develop a Social Media Strategy around it. It'd help you to analyze and keep track on your progress. Otherwise, you'd not be able to measure the ROI (Return on Investment) of your social media marketing.

Social Media can immensely help your product and brand to attain a stable respect among the other businesses.

Your competitors have already started developing their Social Media marketing strategy and the risk starts here, if your business is not adopting the latest trend then it cannot reach the latest minds.

Related: Learn how to increase your productivity on Social Media.

2. Identify your personas and audience

Identify your personas and audience

When it comes to running a business, it is important to know your ideal customer. What would be the result if I try to sell basketballs to baseball lovers? Not very productive. It doesn't sound fair and smart.

Similarly, if you are planning to promote your small business on social media, then you must sit down and develop your social media strategy around the buyer persona you want to target.

Social media is a scattered place, hence, you need to define the audience you want to keep in mind while developing content or your social media compaigns to gain maximum exposure.

It's true that not everyone on Social Media will need your product or service but in order to understand people having problems that can be solved by your product, you need to identify your audience and buyer persona.

Tips to identify your buyer personas on social media

  • Analyze their problems.
  • Identify their priorities.
  • Understand their objections.
  • Discover their information channels
  • Figure out their buying process
  • Pitch your product as a solution

At Statusbrew, we highly align our goals to help people who need us. This article is a solution for those who want to grow their small business on Social Media.

Check our last blog post: 6 business problems faced by small business owners. Which one is yours?

3. Determine the social media goals for your business

Unless you have a clear objective or goal in your mind, you won't be able to drive success for your business on social media. Your social media goals should not be limited to getting likes or followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. On the contrary, you should focus on factors such as leads, sales, conversions and web referrals.

While setting up social media goals for your small business keep in mind that these goals should be trackable or measurable.

Without measuring your social media efforts, you won't be in a situation to know whether you are able to meet the social media goals that you've set up for yourself.

4. Connect with like-minded businesses on social media

In the online world, relationships are everything. Whether you are promoting your business on Facebook or LinkedIn, you must take out some time to build connections with people.

If you are assuming that you'd be able to establish your business on social media without relationships , then you are wrong. Alike in real world where relationship matters to run a business, it holds true for the social media.

Thus, you should spend time in building relationships with like-minded businesses or you can collaborate with influencers active in your niche. It'd give exposure to your small business.

Nowadays, people believe influencer's more than a brand, hence connecting with influencers would bring positive results for your business on social media.

As a small business owner, you'd be thinking that it would be hard for you to take out time on a daily basis to build relationships with businesses or professionals. However, you can use various social media monitoring tools to listen and quickly engage with the right people on social media.

5. Staying active on social media

Staying active on social media

Your audience needs constant help throughout their days, nights and even during Christmas holidays. So are you available to take their concern and ask what they need?

If you don’t do it then others would come and use this opportunity to grow their business.

Why do people go to influencers like Sam Hurley, Neil Patel, Joe Pulizzi or Mari Smith? Because their social strategies allow them to stay super active on Social Media. They are easily approachable.

People have smart memory system — they go to the brand or business that ask for their problems and solve them to their best.

Social Care is one way to get into a conversation with your audience. To do this, you have to be online on Social networks — your audience is everywhere on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit and so on.

Social Media is an amazing place to have a live conversation with your audience and customers which also gives you the freedom to serve your customers efficiently.

Related: How we improved our Customer service on Social Media at Statusbrew?

6. Find leads on social media

The biggest advantage of marketing your business on social media is not to generate leads but high quality leads through targeting your potential customers.

Thus, if you are also looking to generate leads for your small business through social media, then you can use Facebook advance targeting ads to reach out to your potential customers.

Facebook ad targeting helps you to refine your audience and target only your customers or potential customers.

For example: If you are running a local restaurant and want to target people from your area, it is possible with Facebook advance targeting ads.

Similarly, you can use Google Adwords to target people from your locality and run ads.

7. Use social media calendar

use social media calendar

Sharing your posts randomly on social media without any proper planning can ruin your chances to grow your business. Therefore, you should create a social media calendar to plan your social media activities well in advance. Moreover, creating a content calendar helps you to set end goals for your social media efforts and help to analyze & measure your online success.

8. Which is the best social media platform for my business?

Often small business owner gets confused over choosing the right social media platform for their business. A large number of small business owners have limited social media resources and they want to invest it in the right social media platform.

However, it is immensely difficult to determine which social media platform would be suitable for your business and bring more results.

To discover which social media platform works best for you, you need to analyze your performance on different social platforms to discover the truth.

We have made a list of top social media platforms to give you a sense that which platform can be best for your business

Facebook: It is the largest social networking site with 3 billion people around the globe using this platform. Thus, if you want to grow your business on Social media then facebook marketing would definitely help you in a big way. According to a report, there are more than 1 million small and medium businesses are promoting their business using this platform.

Instagram: This platform has become one of the top social networking sites in a short span of time. With more than 300 million users active on this site, it helps small business owners to promote their business or products using visual compelling stories.

Linkedin: It is considered to be the largest professional network in the world. With 332 million professionals active on this site, it can be a great social networking site for you to promote your small business.

Twitter: This social networking site has more than 320 million users active on this platform. This social networking site is being used to share a real-time update with users, answer their questions and release the latest news and at the same time use the targeted ads with specific audiences. A large number of small businesses are using Twitter to grow their business online.

Youtube: Youtube is the largest and most popular video-based social media site. Moreover, it is the second most popular search engine behind Google. With more than 1 billion visitors every month this platform can help you build a successful brand on social media.

Pinterest: This is a relatively new social media site but its visual content help businesses to generate targeted traffic and leads to their website. You can create specific boards and share pins with your followers using this tool.

9. Which are top social media management tools for small businesses?

In order to enhance your social media strategy and your online presence, you have to use right Social Media management tool for your small business. Which becomes mandatory for many reasons.

If you ask WHY then the answer is super clear. To automate your actions like publishing posts, sharing content, engaging with your audience and finding right people on Social Media.

Make sense?

If you do all these activities manually, it’s going to take much of your day and night limiting you from concentrating on other important things.

Statusbrew: Many small business owners and entrepreneurs are in love with everything that Statusbrew offers them -- from scheduling and analyzing multiple posts, engaging with the potential audience, finding influencers and generating business-leads to the super efficient customer success team.

Our team at Statusbrew has been focusing to serve Statusbrew as a solution to multiple problems faced by Small Businesses, Entrepreneurs, Travelers and to many others since its inception and we honestly update our platform every week with new features. Lately, we decided to serve it to many -- not only as a Social Media Management tool but as an Influencer marketing platform.

Found it interesting? We'd love to have you try Statusbrew for managing your Social Media. Just head on to www.statusbrew.com and select the plan of your choice to start a 14-day trial

Buffer is a famous social media scheduling tool. This tool will help you to easily create & schedule your content on major social media sites Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram. This tool is available in both free and paid plans.

HootSuite is another popular social media monitoring tools, and it is an enterprise package tool for analyzing and listening to your social media responses. The platforms that Hootsuite supports include Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress, Instagram, Youtube and more.

Prices: Starting at $19 per month, $99 per month, $499 per month

Sprout Social is a wrap up social media monitoring tools for business. It helps you in either way to monitor and engage yourself from its dashboard. You can even publish posts from Sprout social dashboard and pool resources with your team delegates.

Prices: Starting at $99 per month, $149 per month, and $249 per month

IFTTT will alert you to each feed where ever your keyword or specific topic mentioned online. IFTTT works on a simple flow enabling to give trigger, and it then gets into action accordingly.
For an instant, you can enter your search term and RSS feed URL to create a trigger. The supporting platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Delicious, Buffer and Google Drive.

Price: Free

We have written a fresh article on the same, How to find influencers using Statusbrew for your business?

10. Measuring metrics will help you grow your business

Measuring metrics will help you grow your business

Metrics come in as a major component that either makes you happy or aware of your past Social Media strategy and activity.

It’s not just numbers but the attention you gained from your target niche.

More than numbers, it’s about how people engage with you on Social Media.

Questions to ask while monitoring and measuring your metrics:

  • Do people respond to your content?
  • Do people share your content?
  • Do people criticise your content?
  • What types of post gained more attention?
  • How effective were your CTAs?
  • Did you generate your expected revenue?
  • How to maximize these?

Metrics might not make you happy in the beginning. By sharing and experimenting with your content will generate positive results that will help you grow your business.

It will give you a clear idea before you step into your next Social Media strategy or campaign.

In order to save a lot of your precious time, use Statusbrew publish feature to schedule, publish and analyze your Social Media posts on various social networks.

Related: If you are running a SaaS business then check out our article: The Key Metrics Your SaaS Business Should Measure.

Moreover, you can also check this video

Social media marketing tips for small business

To develop better idea about how to promote your business on social media.

Eager to know from you

Life of an entrepreneur is full of thrills and learnings. It takes real courage to start and smartness to grow your business.

Write down your opinion and share your experience with us about this article in the comment section below.

We are eager to know from you about your Social Media strategy and ready to help you in every way possible.

Mika Suzuki

Japan Head @Statusbrew

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