How to Use Social Media For Small Business Website
Internet marketing has taken another dimension in recent years. These days, social media is gradually leading the chase when it comes to online platforms to gain trust and good reputation for small businesses. If you want to expand your small business and reach the pinnacle of your business goals, it won’t be a good idea to leave social media marketing out of the equation. If you are not already familiar with the strategies to stamp your feet on social media platforms to grow your brands, this content will help you a lot. Read on to discover how to use social media for small business. But first, let’s look at the benefits of social media marketing for small business.
Importance of Social Media Marketing
Why is it even necessary to use social media for small business? Are there any benefits of using social media marketing to grow a small business website? The answer to the above questions is, YES, there are tons of important reasons why social media marketing is a great way of promoting small business websites and turning them into bigger ventures Below are the reasons for using social media for small business marketing.
You can get more customers there
There are more than 2.5 billion users across all social media platforms in the world. Most of these users spend more time on the social media platform than on websites. What does this mean for small business owners? It means that they are likely going to miss a large chunk of the market if they concentrate solely on the conventional search engine marketing and other non-social media marketing techniques. Moreover, most small business websites are involved in social media for small business, which means those who do not join the trend will struggle very hard to compete with others
It provides a competitive edge
You need to include social media for small business marketing into your strategy as soon as possible to be able to stay abreast with competition. If your competitors are not yet in social media marketing, it’s a huge opportunity to stay ahead of them and take advantage of the new customer base the platforms are offering. But if they are already there it’s also good to get yourself involved in order not to lag behind.
It helps you easily connect with prospects and clients
Social media provides the right medium for you to converse with your audience and clients like no other platform do. With social media, you can easily engage with your clients as they will see you as a social friend rather than a stranger only interested in marketing their products. Social media gives more room for business owners to create followers and community of fans who can engage with you as opposed to a one-way business that sends only marketing information. So, it provides the right avenue for your customers to trust you, and surely people only buy from who they trust.
These are some of the important reasons to join the league of social media marketers to give your site better opportunities for growth and expansion.
10 Tips on How to Use Social Media for Small Business
There are certain ways and processes to follow in order to do the right things when using social media for business. With the right approach, you will definitely see positive results on the overall performance of your site. Below is a list of social media marketing tip to follow for improved performance.
1. Have a goal
All businesses need a goal and a plan. Before you begin anything about social media for small business, you need to have carefully mapped out strategies. This plan will be the basis for all you will do in your social media marketing. Set the goals you want to achieve in your marketing endeavor. Metrics like number of retweets and likes are important, but you need to go further than that and focus more on web referrals, conversion rates, and leads generated. Set goals that are timely, relevant, attainable, measurable, and specific. You also need to have a social media calendar to write dates you intend publishing instagram tweets and facebook posts as well as other vital contents you want to publish on other social media sites. All these will help you follow your goals and determine how far you have gone in achieving those goals.
2. Select the right platform for your kind of business
The different social media platforms have their differences and specific benefits. Some platforms will be more suitable for your business than others. Certainly, Facebook is the most appealing platform due to its enormous reach. LinkedIn will be more appealing to professionals and those providing services. Instagram on the other hand, has more visual appeal than other social media sites. This is where products with more aesthetic appeal will do well. Other social sites like YouTube, Snapchat, and Twitter all have their benefits and shortfalls when it comes to using social media for small business. You can select more than one platform but have a major platform as the focal point for most of your activities.
3. Understand your audience
Understanding your audience and potential customers is very important because it will help you engage them properly. Without the right information on the traits of your target audience, appealing them will be very difficult. Do proper research using the tools provided by each of the platforms to know things like their average income, goals, pain points, location, gender, and age. To do this effectively, you can create audience personas for them and collect relevant information that can help you send the right message.
4. Promote your products using social media
Promoting your brand is not quite easy as many people would think. It entails more than simple tweeting or posting about your products every now and then. You need to come up with a good strategy to do things the right way. You can start by posting engaging contents and conversing with your audience until they have become acquainted to you. Share contents that will be valuable to your customers. This will make them see you as someone who can provide solutions and not just someone interested in selling only products. In some of your posts, include a call to action to get them more engaged.
5. Build a strong reputation
Building a strong reputation with your brand is not as difficult as it sounds. Remember that there is a difference between having a huge following and having a credible reputation. As a small business, what you need is to connect with the right set of people and your reputation will increase. The most ideal way to achieve this is to create an online presence through constant and relevant tweets and Facebook posts that accurately represents who you are both offline and online.
6. Connect with like minded professionals in your business areas
Social media marketing is so vast that it might be very easy to derail and miss the real picture of how you want to build you brand awareness. But if you stay connected to like-minded professionals in your area of business interest in LinkedIn and other social platform, you can stay informed and updated about current trends and latest developments in the social media sphere. This will help you stay focused on your goals and include new strategies that have recently become relevant.
7. Diversification is vital
Diversifying in social media for business does not necessarily mean you have to be involved in all the social networks. It only entails concentrating not just on one platform but keeping your presence known in other platforms that give your kind of business room to expand and develop. As stated earlier, not all social media platforms will be right for your kind of business. Just find out the platforms’ various benefits and select the ones that are more appealing to you.
8. Make good use of graphics, videos, and images whenever possible
Visual elements are more effective than texts when it comes to engaging customers. Incorporate visuals in your messages as mush as possible and make sure they are very relevant to the content you are posting or tweeting. Visuals tend to have long lasting effects on your audience.
9. Concentrate more on the quality of your content rather than the quantity
In social media marketing, it won’t be wise to fill up your audience news feeds with lots of contents. As has been observed, the quality of contents usually drops when the quantity increases. Moreover, most audience will see your posts as spammy if you keep posting contents at all times. This is why you need as ocial media calendar to make it easy to coordinate all posts and tweets you make on each of the platforms you are involved in. Try to maintain a moderate number of posts on each of the platforms. Creating audience persona will also help you know which social media site to concentrate on more than others. All these will help you maintain a moderate number of posts daily or monthly to stay relevant each time.
10. Avail different social media tools to make things easier for you
Most social media platforms have different tools to make your job easier for you. If you make use of the right tools, you can save valuable amount of time and become more effective in your social media for small business marketing. There are different tools for scheduling posts, tools for integration, and others for monitoring conversations on different platforms. All these will help you effectively do your social media for small business marketing properly.
How to use social media for small Business – expert suggestions and quotes
Behind every business, there is always an expert and a leader in that field of endeavor. The same is applicable to social media marketing. There are those who have been there and successfully used the right strategies to give their business a solid reputation. If you want to know how to use social media for small business, some expert suggestions and quotes will provide guidance to the right path for you.
After all, it’s always a good idea to take a clue from those who have actually reached that business pinnacle you intend to climb. This will definitely help you avoid some mistakes and cut down on your learning curves. This segment provides the best quotes and suggestions from established names when it comes to social media for small business marketing.
1. Share More Video Content
Video content is the rave of the moment. As the result of advances in network connectivity, more users now prefer watching videos than reading texts. This trend is certainly going to increase in 2018. Social media experts see video content as a better means of leaving a lasting memory on their audiences than any other form of communication. In line with this,
Ileana Smith, a renowned Youtuber and Podcaster, advised that business organizations and social media marketers will be able to take their business to the next level if they imbibe a culture of creating and sharing more video contents with their audiences. She further explained that new platforms like Facebook Live, Periscope, and Blab are making videos more effective in marketing than any other means.
In her words, “great videos do not need to be expensive to produce if you are making use of the right tools”. Social media have been humanized through live streaming, and it’s advantageous for any social media marketer who inculcates this into their marketing plans.
2. Try to stay relevant and influential
According to William Hall, Marketing head at Edugeeks club, influential marketing is the rave of the moment. It’s trending seriously, and there is a good reason for this. Social media users will be more inclined to follow people who have genuine opinions to their issues and problems. This will definitely have a great impact on their decisions to make purchases.
They are more likely to yield to the opinions of the people they follow and trust than any other person. This is in line with what Carter Hosteley, founder and CEO of Leadtail (B2B social media agency), has pointed out. He recommended three major aspects where social media marketers need to focus on to grow faster and gain good reputation. They should focus on influencer marketing, content syndication, and account-based marketing.
3. Work smart instead of trying to be a “jack of all trades”
In social media for business you don’t have to engage in everything, according to Joe Pulizi, CEO of Content Marketing Institute. Instead of trying to cast your net across all types of apps and platforms to reach all audiences, it’s more effective to concentrate on the few that suit your type of business. This is especially important for beginners. He explained that social media marketing has not changed a lot in the past years.
It still boils down to 3 basic things – focus on a particular type of content (whether in person, audio, video, or textual), few platforms (Youtube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, etc), and consistent delivery of high quality content to a particular audience. With this approach, you’ll get a better focus and stay very effective instead of being everywhere to reach different audiences.
Conclusion
Social media marketing has grown in leaps and bounds in recent years. If you have not started exposing your business through social media, my dear you are really missing a chunk of the market. You don’t need a lot of money to get a strong foot in the social networks.
All you need is to begin with the right strategies as pointed out above. With time, you will definitely make headways and reach that success goal you have set for your business.
