Helpful Tips To Build Your Small Business on Social Media

As of 2020, almost 1.69 billion users were present on Facebook. Twitter and Instagram are close contenders. With such staggering numbers, it’s clear that social media holds a ton of potential for businesses to capture user-attention and engage them. The implications are even more promising for small businesses as they often have limited marketing options.

There’s a reason why almost 97% of marketers use social media. What’s more, almost 80% of salespeople use it to outperform their peers.

It is, therefore, unfortunate that almost 50% of small businesses don’t properly use social media for promotional purposes. The numbers are alarming.

In this post by SPOPLI Web Development & Services, we look at why social media is important for business and how they can use it optimally.

Tips To Build Your Small Business on Social Media

Know Your Competition

Your social media strategy should ideally begin by analyzing what your competitors are up to and how they’re doing it. The competitive analysis gives you an inkling of what might work and what might not.

You can use Facebook Pages to recognize the best-performing competitors. You can then compare their audience growth, engagement, and activities to match with your own. By looking at what they’re posting, its frequency, and the most engaging posts, you can tweak your own strategy. You should try to emulate brands with the highest engagement rates.

If you’re not sure of your competitors you can use a bunch of tools to conduct competitive analysis such as SEMrush.

Pick the Right Platforms to Promote

Today you get to choose from a myriad of social media platforms. However, that doesn’t mean that all of them are right for your business. If this is your first time diving into social media, it’s best if you conduct a survey and ask your customers directly about your preferred channels.

For businesses that are already active on a few social media channels, it’s best if you check which platforms are the most efficient. You can base that on the level of engagement and other metrics. 

Another way to pick all the right channels is to see on which platforms your competitors are most active. Look into the channels where they’re putting their most energies. This will increase your likelihood of doubling or even tripling your engagement.

Engage your Audience Constantly

If you want to increase your visibility, you must regularly engage with your audiences. How can you do that? Well, you can conduct polls, quizzes, ask questions, giveaways, and most importantly - share valuable content.

You must establish a dialogue with them through comments so they feel like sharing, liking, and subscribing to you. 

It’s good to provide a mix of valuable, interesting, thought-provoking, and funny content to keep things fresh.

Create Visually Appealing Content

Humans are visual creatures. Rather than a long post, an appealing image has a far more likelihood of getting noticed. The visual appeal is even more important on platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. 

Be sure that images are high-quality, relevant, and attention-grabbing. Keep them clean and avoid overlapping the images with weird fonts. 

If you don’t have the expertise of a designer, tools like Canva could solve all your designing woes.

Focus on Quality over Quantity

At the end of the end, people like brands and influencers that are authentic. But, authenticity will only come if you are honest and true to your brand. Instead of trying to overdo everything, you must create content that seems honest and offers great value.

Instead of dividing your efforts across 5 different channels and posting average content, it’s better if you stick with only one or two platforms but offer excellent content. If all you do is post self-promotional content, there will be little reason for users to follow you back and see what you have to say. Make sure your content encourages relationship building. 

Use the Right Tools

If you’re a small business that wants to make the most of social media, these tools will make your life a lot easier.  

• Tool for monitoring engagement - It’s not enough to just post on social media and then forget about it. Social media is more than a way to broadcast. It’s a way to engage fans and customers. To make engagement easier, you can use tools like Hootsuite. 

With this tool, you can see all the messages from all your platforms in one centralized location. You can also respond to them all at once. No need to log in to each account separately.

• Analytics - To see which posts are getting the maximum engagement, you can use analytical tools like Hootsuite Insight. You can also use Brandwatch. Both of these help to paint a bigger picture of how well you are doing across all channels. You can see a pattern to your efforts and also see which posts have a better likelihood of grabbing customer attention so you can tweak your efforts accordingly.

• Graphics - If you do not have a designer on-board, you can always use a bunch of designing tool such as Canva and VSCO. They are easy to use and even those without any designing experience will find it easy to work with them. You can also Google how to edit Instagram photos if you wish to up the ante for your IG posts.

• Content Curation - When you are a beginner, it’s easy to have a ton of ideas. But, soon you will see yourself running out of ideas. Thankfully, with tools like BuzzSumo, you will always have something to write about. You just have to feed in the relevant keywords, and it will show you the hottest and the trendiest topics in your niche. Additionally, you can use Grammarly to check for grammar mistakes and Copyscape to make sure you write unique content.

Bottom Line

Social media is without a doubt, one of the most powerful marketing weapons in the arsenal for small businesses. If done rightly, it could skyrocket your success.