5 Quick Social Media Tips to Make an Impact For Your Small Business

Social media dominates the online metropolis that is the internet. This isn’t just an opinion or popular myth, this is a documented, etched in stone fact especially when it comes to online retailers and customer interaction. Every day people are scrolling Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more for their daily doses of content whether it’s the latest news or fresh memes to help them laugh or just to engage with their friends and family across the country and the world.

Every day in the United States alone, 79% of online adults use Facebook on average of 20 minutes per day according to Business Insider and 22% of the world’s total population is on Facebook. That’s a lot of users, no matter how you crunch those numbers, but most importantly to you, that’s a lot of potential customers as well. If you want to perform online and grab the attention of your target audience, there are a few things you need to consider when building your social media strategy.

1. Be Authentic on Your Social Media Platforms

Your social media followers use these platforms precisely for the interaction and engagement that they can have with your brand. Unlike the good ‘ol days when consumers were often passive participants in the daily bombardment of TV commercials, today’s consumers can interact directly with your business at the simple click of a hyperlink.

Don’t treat your social media channel strictly as a promotional tool, after all how often do you enjoy being solicited too when you go out to window shop? Yes, you want to promote your brand, but not in a way that turns people off, so you want to engage your audience on their terms. Be honest and helpful when customers ask questions about your products, create a FAQ section if you see the same questions being asked, but most importantly be unique! If your website is selling homemade cinnamon sugar cookies, let the audience know why your cookies are different from everyone else’s maybe the dough is powered by the magic of unicorns or kneaded fresh by kitchen elves! If you can entertain customers while putting your products on display, all the better.

2. Commit Yourself to Your Social Media Strategy

As much as we’d all like to believe it could happen to us, the ubiquitous ‘Overnight Success Story’ is very much a rare and unrealistic goal to attain. While it can happen if you offer a service or product so unique and ground-breaking that it captures views faster than your servers can handle, you’ll more than likely have to put considerable time and effort into building your social media following from the ground up.

You’ll need content, posts, a fully updated and optimized page so that your customers know exactly what it is that you do. You need to plan out advertising campaigns and set budgets for how long and how much you want to spend to put your brand out there in front of customers. The long and short of it is, you have to put the time in to build your social media presence from nothing before you begin to see customers interacting with you online.

3. Don’t Over-Extend Yourself Across Multiple Platforms

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr… these are only a few of hundreds of different platforms that you can interact with. When you’re a small business wanting to make a big impact, your first instinct might be to utilize the ‘shotgun approach’, which simply means putting your brand on every, and I mean EVERY, social media platform you can find.

While this technique can be beneficial to you in the long run, especially by showing you which platforms are the most active, the rule of ‘quality not quantity’ applies here. Having stronger content spread across fewer channels will provide you with the best results. You’ll want to also consider the size of your social media management team when deciding how many platforms to put yourself on.

Is your page admin Jim from accounting, who also happens to do IT when he’s not simultaneously designing a cool logo for your company shirts, or do you have a multi-admin team each tending to one platform at a time? Maybe you have one big group that can spread duties out across all your selected platforms at once. Whatever the case may be, you want to make sure the level of content you put out there is sustainable with the team you have and build or downsize as necessary from there.

4. Don’t Let Video Posts Intimidate You

If you want people to notice your brand online, one of the best ways to go about it is to create posts with short videos. There are many stock photo and video sites that you can utilize for this, like Pexels for example. You can find simple video editors that are affordable or free to put some content together or if you have access to products like Adobe Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Premier, and AfterEffects, such programs can give you professional editing tools to make stunning content.

If the process of setting up an entire recording studio intimidates you, don’t fret because you can make effective posts with simple moving images and text effects that don’t require any kind of special recording equipment. It’s a fantastic way to experiment with your marketing while engaging your audience and learning what works on each platform.

5. Boost the Best Content For an Even Farther Reach

Keep track of your analytics for each feed and see which posts are performing well and which are just kind of ‘meh’. The ones that have the highest clicks or views are ones you should consider boosting with an advertising campaign. This way you can target specific audiences who are looking for products and services that you’re selling.

Thanks to numerous changes to the Facebook algorithm, finding organic likes and followers, has become a challenge even for top companies. Injecting some advertising dollars into a post for say $50 for 7 days can go a long way in reaching customers who don’t know your company exists and is much more cost effective than many traditional advertising avenues.

In Summary:

You want to be realistic about your social media goals and sustainability, especially if you’re a new company looking to grow your brand. Fortunately we here at ALM Web Pros, LLC have a full social media department ready to help your company attain those goals. We can optimize all of your channels for maximum search-ability and run campaigns for you at your discretion so that you can focus on keeping your business up and running.