Social media top tips – don’t make it too complicated
Love it or hate it, social media is an essential way to connect with potential clients.
Social media platforms are budget-friendly, and have an audience that is ready and willing to connect and engage with you and your small business.
However, for a small business, creating your social media presence and strategy can be daunting. I hear you cry; Which platforms do I choose? How much time do I spend on them each day? How do I compete with the big wig companies? Don’t worry, it really doesn’t have to be too stressful and complicated.
Blue Cactus Digital presents some social media top tips for small businesses:
Plan and strategise
Everyone loves a plan. It’s a great place to start when looking at your social media strategy.
Just like creating a business plan, why not sit down and write your aims and objectives for your social media community. They could be to expand your audience or increase customers, rather than just gaining likes.
Research competitors on social media and see what works for them. You won’t have to copy them but can learn from their successes and failures.
Create a content calendar to ensure you post content at the right time on the best platforms. One social media top tip to remember, is that you do not need to have a completely slick campaign – it is an informal and impactful way of reaching your audience and not meant to be 100% planned or polished.
Best platforms
One of the most important social media top tips is to ensure you jump on to the right platforms that suit your small business. By looking at basic stats of each main platform you will be able to establish which ones will work best for you, for example LinkedIn is great for business to business networking, and Facebook is the most popular platform globally currently.
You do not need to be present on every platform, and in this case it can be quality over quantity. Just keep in mind that you can use different platforms to reach different audiences and goals.
Get to know audience
You will most likely have already worked out who your ideal client is for your small business. This could be a good time to revisit it and incorporate it into your social media planning. It may be worth an analysis to find out what social media platforms would your ideal client most visit and what kind of posts would they like to see.
The great thing about social media marketing for small businesses is that you have access and opportunity to reach and expand a wider audience organically. Ensure you utilise it by building relationships with them, responding to all comments, interactions and messages and keeping them interested in your profile and brand.
Interactive content
As social media top tips go, this could be number one. As in the previous point, a great way to expand your audience is to engage with them. Content is key for this. It can be tricky to create interesting and unique content that isn’t as dull as dishwater. But there’s so many options out there. Visuals and video.
According to research by Twitter, people are three times more likely to engage with their tweets if they have something visual included, such ad video, photo, GIF, and info graphic. Over on Facebook, 100 million hours of video is watched daily.
As a small business, competing with the national and global companies, make sure you have some good visuals that are going to make people want to keep scrolling and reading your posts. Also with text content – it is simple – keep it unique, company-focused and engaging.
Tools to help
There’s tools for everything in life, and social media is no different.
As you implement your social media strategy, it’s important to track your performance, so you know what is working and what isn’t. Most social media platforms have their own analytic tools built it (Instagram and LinkedIn’s are good), but you can also use tools such Brandwatch for a more rounded and in-depth analysis of all sites.
Getting graphics compatible for each platform is important, so using built-in tools for each site will ensure this happens.
Blue Cactus Digital’ last social media top tip is to schedule posts when you can so that you have more time for building relationships with clients and focusing on content. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are both useful tools for this.
