Social Media for Small Business 101
The definitive guide to optimizing your small business’s social media.
In today’s age, social media is essential for any business, big or small. A good social media strategy is what builds awareness for your brand, gives you the ability to directly interact with your target audience, and ultimately drive sales.
In this definitive guide, you will learn how to establish and run your business’s social media to fully utilize the platforms to build brand awareness and increase sales for your small business.
Table of Contents
- The Value of Social Media
- Creating a Social Media Strategy
- Finding your Target Audience
- Create and Manage Content
- Evaluate, Test, and Find Success
Chapter 1: The Value of Social Media
Running a small business is not an easy feat consisting of busy days and busy nights. But even with it all, social media cannot fall off the to-do list as it brings an enormous amount of value to any business.
Social media has a huge impact on whether a consumer buys a product or service. SproutSocial breaks down these statistics, showing that 57.5% of people are more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social media.
In the digital age we live in today, most people go to the internet for their information. Because of this, what your business presents online will establish its reputation and its level of credibility.
77.6% of small businesses report using social media to promote their businesses.
The Business and Economics Journal states social media “symbolizes a marketing and promotion opportunity that transcends the standard middleman and connects companies directly with clients.” This explains why even the largest of companies, such as Starbucks or Nike, from mom-and-pop shops across the world use social media and their promotion abilities to their advantage. To a business, nothing is more important that its customers, and social media gives businesses the ability to directly interact with both existing and potential customers. 71% of people are more likely to buy from a brand after a positive social interaction. This action could range from posting interesting visuals to being responsive to comments. Brands like Taco Bell find success in using humor in their social posts to relate more to their target audience, and to get attention throughout the network.
With posts like this, Taco Bell is able to connect with their customers on a personal level in an environment where it’s easy to share both common interests and posts to a large, circulating platform. Publishing social media content establishes a presence for a brand, giving them endless opportunities for outreach and building personal, trusting relationships with their audience.
Chapter 2: Creating a Social Media Strategy
To start off your social media, you must first define your goals. A common formatting for this is the S.M.A.R.T template: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.
Specific — With a specific objective, like increasing traffic by 30%, the easier it will be to see what you need to do to make you social media work for you.
Measurable — Be sure that your goal can be measured. In order to see progress, you must be able to track to know how your goal is being achieved.
Attainable — The key is to have a goal you can actually achieve, so do not make it unrealistic.
Relevant — Is your goal going to drive your business in a positive direction? Remember that the goal needs to work best for what your business offers and at the right time.
Timely — Without deadlines, goals are empty. Keep yourself on track and give yourself an end date to achieve your goal.
You can print it off or type it in, but be sure to keep you social media strategy close and on-hand in order to find success with your social media. This will keep you organized and will get you achieving your goals in no time!
Chapter 3: Finding Your Target Audience
In order to build you brand, you need to know who to target and what to target them on. The is key to be able to create content that customers will like, comment on, and share. It is also critical if you want to turn your social media followers into customers for your business.
To start, you need to know the following details about your target customer:
- Age
- Location
- Average income
- Typical job title or industry
- Interests
- etc.
Creating a customer persona can be helpful when establishing your target audience. Using templates such as this can assist you in doing so!
Get to know your followers and customers as real people with real wants and needs, this way you know exactly how to engage with them. Each social network brings its own benefits to the table, but not all will be successful for everyone. Starting off with platforms that make the most sense for your business will help you save time and avoid becoming overwhelmed as you organize your content for the future.
79% of internet users in the US have a social network profile and this number is projected to increase to 257 million in 2023. However, not everyone uses every social media site. To target your audience correctly, you need to see what social media sites they use the most. For the sake of this guide, we will focus on the top three social media sites: Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Instagram is a visual platform, making it the perfect place to show the public your product or service in action. Instagram gives you the ability to post photos or videos and directly interact with comments, likes and shares. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than any other type, and videos on Instagram get 21.2% more interaction compared to images. Instagram also has great options for e-commerce and makes it easier to make followers into customers.
Have a short and sweet message that speaks volumes? Twitter is the place to be. Twitter is known for its limited word count posts and shareable media, making it the perfect network for articles or blog posts, announcement, customer support, and customer interaction.
This platform has the ability to connect to users quickly, making it the perfect space for witty, humor-filled interaction that builds a relationship with your audience. As you can see here, Target gives us a great example of this — interaction with their consumers, building off of the content voicing their $10 off deal, and adding a little fun to the mix. It’s all the perfect place to quick updates and promo codes to share via retweets.
As far as social networks go, Facebook is the most widely used site. It is described an all-purpose network with the ability to share photos and videos, post business updates and information such as hours and promotions, and other content that can assist you in building your brand to the public. Out of all social media platforms, 8% of social media marketers worldwide stated that they produced the best ROI by utilizing Facebook. This platform is a great place for detail that can’t be put in an Instagram caption or in a 280-character length tweet. You can make your brand known and have your message resinate with your audience by using Facebook.
Just because these are the top three, doesn’t mean that these are the only platforms your audience is utilizing. TikTok, Pinterest, Youtube, and Linkedin are just a few other options worth exploring to see if they fit well for your product and its target audience. Pew Research Center is a fantastic resource in finding information about your target demographic. Below you can find two of the many graphs and charts that they have to help you better understand how your target audience uses social media. This page will also provide you with data on what social media platform specific demographics use on a daily basis.
Chapter 4: Create and Manage Your Content
So you’ve defined your goals, discovered your target audience and have chosen the platforms you’ll be using… it’s time to start posting.
Your social media posts should showcase your product effectively, appeal to your target audiences’ interests and revel your brand’s identity. As a busy small business owner, content batching is the create way to avoid becoming overwhelmed while creating your social media content.
Content Batching
Content batching is a productivity technique where you create all of your captions or visual content during a set period of time. So, instead of spending an hour brainstorming, creating and publishing a single post, you’ll spend that hour writing an entire week of captions.
Even though this may sound counterproductive and a lot at once, it will actually give you the ability to focus your creativity in one place without distractions. This will also give you the ability to plan your contents weeks in advance leading to an easier, more organized approach to your social content.
Social Media Scheduling
Another must-have tool in a small business owner’s toolkit is a social media scheduler. The last thing you want to do is forget about posting the content you worked hard to put together and prepare. And sometimes, there simply isn’t enough time in the day to post. This is where you content scheduler comes into play.
Tools such as Later’s social media scheduling tool will keep you on track and make sure you post consistently. Social media also has a system to it, the best times to post being one of them. Not only will this tool ensure that you post, but it will have you posting at the right time to fully optimize your platform too! The provided table will give you with the best times to post on each social media site, and how often to post, to fully take advantage of the tools at your fingertips.
Chapter 5: Evaluate, Test and Find Success
You’ve organized and posted your content and have generated a good bit of impressions on your posts, but the work doesn’t stop there — there is always room for improvement. As your posts and accounts gain traffic, each platform will start to generate data and when this happens, it’s time to see if you need to reevaluate your strategy. This could include shifting your focus on a different demographic or a putting more effort into one platform more than the other. Start testing different campaigns to see what attracts more clicks or watches, and stack them up against each other. Being able to constantly test your posts allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t.
You can also interact with your audience directly to help you improve your content! Platforms including Instagram, Twitter and Facebook give you some sort of tool to be able to post polls for you followers to interact with. What kind of trends are they into in that moment? Did they like your new special menu item last week? See if you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and be sure to show that you hear what they say loud and clear in future endeavors.
Social media moves fast. But with its help, business profits do too. In our world, social media for business is no longer optional — use it to your advantage and revel in the success it brings.