Supercharge Your Small Business With These Social Media Marketing Tips
Just a few years ago, social media used to be a mere fad to marketers. There was no real way of tracking results for any effort. Justifying the effectivity of campaigns and associating them with conversions was virtually unheard of. But today, it’s different. More and more businesses and organizations are turning to social media for obtaining meaningful insights and information about customers or prospects.
In particular, small businesses who used to rely on the guesswork of social media are now treating it more seriously as an income-generating channel that they can’t neglect. It has become an invaluable supplement to existing digital efforts in content optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and the like.
Today’s small business social media marketing boils down to how these startups leverage the platform to get their desired results.
Detailed below are some opportunities those looking into social media can implement in their small business marketing efforts.
Use social listening to gain more insight about your brand
Do you monitor what people are saying about your brand in various social media platforms? Are you using this information to improve, or if not, to keep doing what you’re doing right? Social listening or media monitoring is all about searching for your company online. It’s a valuable practice for gaining new insight about your prospects, existing customers, and competitors.
Some of the ways to use social listening in your small business may include:
- Conducting quick polls on social and directly asking customers what they what
- Getting actual feedback about your product from customers
- Tracking your brand name’s mentions on social media to resolve issues or answer queries
Here are some tools you can use for social listening:
- Quora – a website where you can track specific questions or topics related to your brand or market
- Twitter Advanced Search – a tool for refining search queries related to your startup or your market; a place where you can use search operators to fine-tune your Twitter search results
- Buzzsumo – a site that provides you with information on how many shares on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. your brand or a certain topic related to your brand has
By using social listening, you can improve many areas in your businesses such as your customer care efforts, your content marketing initiatives, and even your product development.
Plan and schedule ahead to accomplish more
The usual problem with small businesses that dabble in social media is that they try to do a lot of things at once. Lots of startups get so caught up in incessantly sharing content or embarking on gimmicks that are daunting to handle to the point that they’re already putting their social media cred on the line.
With this in mind, every organization needs to come up with a simple posting plan – and they need to stick to it. In social media, consistency is key. Before embarking on other deeper or more expensive strategies, it always pays to stick to the basics first. Don’t hesitate to spend a little on social scheduling tools like Hootsuite because they’re guaranteed to save you tons of hours.
Before every quarter or every month, brainstorm about topics you can create content around. Create a calendar and map out your posts. What do your customers need? What new thing can they learn from you? Once they know what to expect, you can expect them to come back more often.
Asking your employees to evangelize about your product or service on social
Let’s say your organization has eight employees. These eight employees each have an average of 250 friends on Facebook. Can you imagine how much exposure your brand can get when each of these nine employees decide to reach out to their friends on social about your startup? That could mean a lot to you.
If you can motivate your employees to promote your company on their social profiles, it could be an indicator of their level satisfaction at work. When other people outside of the organization see how happy they are at your company, there’s a huge probability that they’ll get interested, too. Customers are more likely to trust content that are come from people they trust, and this is why employee advocacy can be a good way to fish for new prospects.
Below are some ways on how you can level up employee advocacy on social:
- Use employee advocacy platforms such as VoiceStorm to curate content that your employees can share on their networks
- Reward or acknowledge employees who evangelize about your products or service
- Train your employees on how to engage on social media better
Social media for small business can be tricky. Don’t stress out right away if you don’t know a new platform’s features and capabilities. Don’t freak out when you read about a new tactic online. Don’t get frustrated when your engagement rates are flat or when you don’t see your follow count go up despite all your efforts. If your tactics don’t work, don’t be afraid to try out other things. Spend time on researching or going back to the basics, if you must. Like many things digital, it takes some patience for it to work.
Continue reading here: 6 Tips To Make Naming Your Business Easier
Was this article helpful?
