4 Expert Social Media Tips to Help Your Small Business Gain Traction

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Expert Social Media Tips to Grow Your Small Business; Getting to grips with social media can be a pain, especially for small businesses. If you run your business alone, or only have a small team, it can feel impossible to find the time to master social media when it feels so uncontrollable. We all know and understand the power an engaged social media following can have for our businesses; it is an essential part of being a modern and reputable business, so we’ve compiled 4 tips to help you better manage your social media and importantly, see results.

We have also just posted our report on the top 10 Social Media trend you need to know in 2019, to help you craft a better social media strategy.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

With so many different platforms available, and more popping up all the time that could end up being the next big thing, it’s often tempting to make a social media profile on them all with the hope of attracting as many different customers as possible, and the dreams of being the business that pioneered and paved the way. However, this method never works. Unless you have a department full of people at your disposal, you’ll struggle to maintain any of those platforms, let alone them all.

You also need to consider where your customers spend their time online. Facebook has become increasingly difficult to reach your followers organically, but if you serve consumers over 35, you’ll likely still find it is the best platform for you. If you serve university students, you may struggle to get traction on Facebook, but Instagram would work. Find out where your customers spend their time scrolling and be there.

You can find a break down of the top social media platforms, and what sort of demographics you can target on them in our 2 part Social Media for Business Posts Part one and Part Two.

Set Quarterly Goals

If you ask any business doing well with their social media marketing, they’ll all tell you they set goals and create a plan before they post. While posting about something current in the news or something you find inspiring in the moment is perfectly fine (and in many cases, encouraged), you should plan what kind of content and posts you are going to make, on what frequency, with what purpose, and you need to make sure that every single post ties back to your business statement and vision.

Some of the questions you will need to ask when setting your goals are; What do you want to grow? Is it the number of followers you have, general awareness, or engagement? Of course, we all want everything to grow all the time, but realistically, you should try to achieve one specific goal each quarter, at least until your platform is more established.

Test, Test, Test

The number one mistake small businesses make, besides choosing the wrong platform or posting once in a blue moon, is that they post regularly and when they don’t see any engagement, they decide that social media platform just doesn’t work for them. Next time, instead of deciding that it just doesn’t work for your business, double check that your customers are on there, and then experiment with different kinds of posts, there are a number of tools available that will help you measure engagement and get a better understanding of your followers.

Try posts with long blog-style descriptions — Micro Blogs, and others that are just a sentence. Experiment with different images, topics, and video. When something gets more engagement, try doing that same thing again soon. And if you find something that works, continue to experiment from time to time so you continue to evolve.

Use a Social Media Manager or Scheduler

There are plenty of social media scheduling tools you can use to schedule your posts to automatically post for months in advance. If you want to manage your social media yourself, this will be your secret weapon, as they make it easy to take a morning or a day at the beginning of the month to plan and prepare posts for a set amount of time. This can also help you be consistent with your posts over time so you can test their effectiveness before you try something different.

Of course, if you simply don’t have the time to dedicate to social media, but know you need to be on there, you should consider hiring a social media marketing agency who have the expertise to take the reins so you can do what you do best: serving your customers.

Conclusion

Most importantly, do not be harsh on yourself, business is a really rewarding but a tough endeavor, and you need to understand that in order to succeed you need to be trying different avenues of marketing and advertising.

Set yourself realistic goals, and seek help when needed, if you have enough time to perfect your strategy and work on it on an ongoing basis that would be great; alternatively if you like some advice, feel free to contact us for our free strategy call, we will help you identify what steps you can take to conquer social media for good.

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