For small businesses, marketing strategies are utmost critical for them to grow and foster loyal relationships among prospects. The best digital strategy small business owners should invest is maximizing their social media presence.
Developing and optimizing your social profiles will take time and effort, but the benefits, in the long run, will be worth it.
How to improve your social media presence
Plan ahead
Planning ahead is to define your goals, marketing objectives, and strategy. Most business owners when asked why having a social media presence, they only say, “Because, everyone has one.” When placing yourself online, it’s best to tackle certain issues to maximize your digital presence.
Set SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound
Identify your target audience
Which social media presence and channels your audience is active
Type of content you should post
Know your brand, voice, and personality
Come up with a strategy
Choose and adopt multi-platform channels
Identify which social platforms work best for your business. Nowadays, people expect you to have multi-channel for your store. No two platforms are the same, and that’s why you need to adopt creative approaches and knowledge of your audience.
Facebook. It’s the most popular social media presence with 2 billion active monthly users. The platform is perfect for small businesses who want to build relationships and engage personally with their customers.
Instagram. The platform is image and video-driven and perfect for brands with strong visual content. Instagram has high customer engagement potential and audience reach.
Twitter. Twitter is apt for urgent, time-sensitive, and dynamic micro-stories. The platform has a large engagement potential and wide reach especially if you’re using hashtags pertaining to the industry.
LinkedIn. The platform is ideal for creating business opportunities, networking, and B2B/B2C leverages. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn caters to the professional crowd whether they’re industry leaders themselves or job searchers.
Pinterest. This photo-sharing channel has gained popularity among business owners to share their products and services. Pinterest is another visual-concentrated channel where audiences get to “pin” their favorite photos. Businesses can take advantage of the platform where they can link back their photos on their website.
Curate your content
Try creating a content schedule or timeline for your customers. For instance, you would want to post videos every Thursday and a little human-interest story every Tuesday.
Developing an editorial calendar allows you to see possible content you can distribute through the current month. If there’s a holiday coming up, you can curate appropriate posts for that as well.
Choose necessary tools to create and publish content
Creating content can be time-consuming – but staying active on your profiles is necessary. You can use online tools or applications to help you stay on track. For one, Canva is a web-based design application where you can make social media posts, banners, graphics, and more. It comes with free and paid images and templates to get you started.
Meanwhile, tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Later can help you post and schedule content in advance. They come in reporting and messaging features to track and engage your audience.
LeadKlozer is a new tool in the social media space. It does a great job of bridging the communication gap that Facebook presents. Essentially a CRM that allows you to better track and communicate with your audience in real time. We highly recommend this tool and work closely with the developers to ensure it continues to develop and provide great value to customers.
Engage your audience
It’s called “social” for a reason. Try actively engaging your customer by responding to their queries. You can also engage with them by:
- Addressing their complaints
- Participating in their conversation
- Commenting on their posts
- Getting their insights for a topic
- Participate in an online contest with their ideas
Keep a well constant presence on your channels
You do want to be active for your audience, but you don’t have to spam your channels with your content as well. Keep a balanced presence on the platform. For example, limit your Instagram posts up to 3 max a day – or better yet, once a day.
Your Facebook should contain no more than twice a day, unless you’re a news site, or undergoing special activities for your brand. Meanwhile, Twitter is ideal for consistent posts – the more you post, the better your chances of getting higher engagement.
Evaluate your posts
Monitor your progress whether your social media presence and posts reached your goals. Almost all social platforms have built-in metrics to help you understand your reach and engagement. If there’s something amiss, you now know what ticks your customers to entice them.
It’s not always necessary to have your presence in every platform. What you need is to have constant engagement with your audience, and for you to reach your marketing objectives. Remember, while putting up your social profile, you need to put on the effort to cultivate the benefits for your small business.
