Top 12 tips to use social media effectively for Small Business

Top 12 tips to use social media effectively for Small Business

In this blog, we covered essential social media tips for your small business. If you are the owner of any business, you should have spent more time placing your brand on the common networks. Social media is one of the emerging trends that helps to increase the growth of any small business thrice than other media. Spending 10 minutes to one hour on any one of the social media bring for the opportunity for your business reach.

Why Social Media?

Being on social media helps to

  • Build brand awareness
  • Develop a strong relationship between owner and customers
  • Make direct sales on social media platforms
  • Business reach
  • Strong communication
  • More share and reach

Social media networks

 Here are 12 social media tips for your small business

  1. Start with a clear plan
  2. Choose a social media Platform
  3. Create a business account
  4. Connect with your Audience
  5. Increase your Audience
  6. Social Media Ads
  7. Build strong customer relationship
  8. Create social media Groups
  9. More attention to the latest trends
  10. Know about Social Media Analytical tools
  11. Create sharable content
  12. Optimize your Business Page 

1. Start with a clear Plan 

The first step in setting an effective social media strategy is planning. Start with a clear plan and fix a goal to measure the profile growth and ROI. Do not rush with things until you fix certain marketing goals or planning. Planning is more important to understand the marketing strategy and to run an effective social media campaign. Read the social media channels and pick suitable mediums for your business-like Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, etc. Every social media channel has its own benefits, it’s in your hand to choose the best option for your business. First, analyze why you are in social media and how social media helps to drive your business.

social media for business growth

2. Choose a social media Platform

After the planning process, the next step is choosing the right social media platform for your business. Active on every social media is a must for business growth. Choose an effective social media platform by analyzing which social media is best for your business.

Check out the monthly active users on top social media platforms.

  • Facebook: 1.28k billion
  • Google+: 500 million
  • Twitter: 220 million
  • Instagram: 200 million
  • LinkedIn: 180 million
  • Pinterest: 40 million

This analysis helps you to know your audience and which platform has more users before investing in the specific platform.  Not only the business growth depends on the volume of the audience, choosing the right platform matters.

social media for business

For image-based marketing choose Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr

For business, news choose LinkedIn and Twitter

For video-based marketing choose YouTube, vine, and Vimeo

For SEO Google+ and Google My Business is the best choice 

3. Create a Business Account

Instead of using your personal profile for your business marketing, signup with a business profile that creates more professionalism and takes your business to the next level. Having a business page on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn improves your business quality and reach. Having a separate business account on social media creates brand awareness, increases a strong customer base, also helps to connect with the previous and current customers.

Facebook page for business

Best social media platforms to create a business account

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Quora
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest

social media business page

4. Connect with your Audience

To connect with your audience on social media you need to analyze your target audience and find which social media platform they are active in. Connecting deeper with your target audience boost your business value and reputation.

What helps to connect with your target Audience

  • Speak to your audience directly
  • Instant Respond to your customer’s message
  • Create valuable Insights
  • Keep your content more informative and entertain
  • Ask for customer opinions and feedbacks

These are some tricks that help you to connect with your audience on social media platforms.

5. Increase your Audience

Engaging with your audience on social media helps to increase the volume of your audience. Just showcasing your product on social media is not social media marketing, to keep the social media user engaged with your content and increase the follower’s rate is the key reason for marketing on social media platforms. Here are some tips to increase your social media audience for your business growth.

  • Speak more about the trending topic of social media not just your brands
  • Arrange Q &A sessions and go live to interact with more users
  • Create a sharable content
  • Send Greetings to each customer personally on important occasions
  • Create more trust
  • Create visual posts instead of jumbling with words
  • Use proper hashtags
  • Create Polls
  • Frequent posts on social media

Update the latest trends on your social media platforms

6. Social Media Ads

Social media ads are the digital advertising on any one of the social media platforms. It brings more organic traffic to your site. Social media ads are one of the effective ways to connect with your target audience. Social media ads are profitable for business growth that brings more conversions and increase your sales. The main purpose of social media ads is for branding and to bring a quick response from their audience.

7. Build strong customer relationship

Building a strong customer relationship is a challenging task for every business. A strong relationship with the customer comes only by trust.

Social media Business profile

How to build the strong customer relationship

  1. Engage with your customers
  2. Instantly respond to the customer reviews
  3. Rewards your customer
  4. Deliver the best content
  5. Offer quality services

8. Create social media Groups

Creating groups on social media helps to connect with more customers and business owners from the same niche. Social media is a powerful tool for business growth and it drives more traffic as well as income. The main advantage of creating a group is to engage with the users and to get the latest updates

Effective social media groups

  1. Facebook groups
  2. Whatsapp groups
  3. LinkedIn groups

9. More attention to the latest trends

Social media become one of the main platforms of people’s lives and they spend more time to know the latest trends. So many people are addicted to social media by having the app on their mobile phones to check the news feeds. other people just spend their time scrolling the updates on social media. If you are a business owner then spend your valuable time solidly on social media by connecting with the latest trends.

Social media tips for business

10. Know about Social Media Analytical tools

Social media Analytical tools help to track the performance of your social presence and the growth of your business on social media. Check out some social media analytical tools used by the experts

Social media for business profile

  1. Hubspot
  2. IFTTT
  3. Hootsuite
  4. Google Analytics
  5. Facebook Analytics
  6. Instagram Insights
  7. Twitter Analytics
  8. LinkedIn Page Analytics
  9. Brandwatch
  10. Sprout

These are some of the help to get the report of the audience, posts, traffic, views, demographics, activity, and so on.

11. Create sharable content

Creating sharable content on social media helps to get more users and drive more traffic to your website. Choose a topic that triggers the user to share your content and do content on the latest topics. Make your business posts public and visible to everyone on social media.

12. Optimize your Business Page 

Optimizing the business page helps to improve the visibility of the business growth and a well-optimized Facebook Business page or  Instagram Page promotes your product and services to engage with the users. Free Facebook Business tools are available to organize your Business.

social media optimization for business

Tips to optimize social media Business page 

  1. Use your Brand name as a profile name
  2. Use your Brand Logo or high-quality image as a profile image
  3. Use Proper Hashtags
  4. Optimize the post scheduling option
  5. Conduct the keyword Research
  6. Use original content
  7. Run an effective campaign
  8. Give original information on Bio
  9. Customize your  page URL
  10. Highlight your Business contact number and address

Final Words 

Hope this blog helps to understand the need for social media and Important of social media for business growth. Create your business profile now and focus on the business growth on different social media channels.

 

5 essentials for your Social Media Business Strategy

Instagram is becoming a very competitive platform for businesses to reach out to their target audience and increase their brand awareness, so it is vital to create a strategy that will help you stand out and reach further than your competitors by using the platform effectively.

It is still known to be one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your product or service, but I will show you how to maximise your traffic organically.

5 very important elements

The top 5 social media elements you will need when planning your Instagram strategy.

I will let you in on a secret that not many people know about and what I use to reach the maximum traffic without paying a penny. That secret is CHECT – it may not make any sense to you now, but it will make sense very shortly.

CHECT is an acronym that helps remember the 5 key elements to take into consideration when planning an Instagram Strategy. It stands for Content, Hashtag, Engagement, Caption and Tagging:

1.Content

Instagram is a visual platform so making sure that your feed is consistent and on brand is important, because it’s what people first see when they click on your profile. I would suggest writing up a strategy first of what it is that you want your brand to look like.

Do you want to keep it very professional and include your logo on every post? Maybe you want to make it more personal and use pictures that others tag you in or photos you take yourself?

If you decide to use your own photos make sure that they are good quality, you don’t have to invest in an expensive camera as a smart phone can take good quality photos, but bear in mind that even adding too many filters or over editing it can make the picture pixelated.

Plan how often you want to post and whether you want to post once a day, twice a day, every other day or once a week. This is something that you can measure yourself over time, as it works differently for different businesses. However, if you take weeks without posting, people will start to unfollow or lose interest.

2. Hashtags

These days you hear people talking about hashtags everywhere, but how important are hashtags really?
For starters, they increase reach depending on how popular the hashtag you’re using is.

The top 5 most popular hashtags in 2018 were #love #instagood #me #tbt and #cute, so whenever you used any one of these hashtags it meant that it was more likely to be viewed by someone who isn’t following you. Location tags increase engagement up to 79% so not only do people get an idea where your company is based but it also gets viewed by new audiences as that is the primary goal for using hashtags.
Research has shown that posts with at least one hashtag have an average of 12.6% more engagement, 30 is the maximum but from experience 11 seems to be the most effective amount to use on posts.

If there’s a hashtag people are interested in, they can now follow the hashtag on Instagram as if it was a profile account. So anytime someone uses that hashtag on their post it will be viewed on their feed, this is a good method to target you audience.

You can also create your own hashtag for people to use, so their pictures can be features on your page. This is the online ‘word of mouth’ method, where people will see the hashtag and find out more about it through others.

3. Engaging

It’s all about engagement, one of the fastest ways that I grew my Instagram was through engaging with the community, following accounts that had similar interests to the posts that I was sharing. In your case, it means engaging with your target market and influencers. There are various ways you can engage with your current followers; through your story using polls and questionnaires to get to know more about your audience. But also collaborating with relevant influencers and getting in touch with potential customers for new followers, these are considered ‘quality followers’ meaning they are more likely to convert into customers.

You can also engage by adding educational videos, taking videos of you or someone else using your product with step by step guides as it’s a great way for people to learn more about your product. If it’s a service you offer, it can apply to you too by recording a video of you giving the service to your customers. A dentist can do a short video of whitening a patient’s teeth for example, it’s educational and you start to slowly create that trust with your audience.

 

4. Caption

The caption on your posts allows your brand to have a voice and to display how you want to come across on Instagram. Do you want to be more formal and keep it professional or do you want to be more personal and share your thoughts and experiences? Perhaps you choose to keep it short and to the point, keeping it only informational. It’s totally up to you how you want to caption your posts, but consistency is key.

There is no wrong way to caption a post (providing it’s not offending anyone) but creating rules about how to caption posts is important, as in the future you may want to delegate this responsibility to someone else. This way they will have clear guidelines, as it is practically the voice of your brand.

5. Tagging

You will find that at some point, your customer will upload a picture and tag you on it, it’s always best to ask first if you could use their picture and then mention them on the caption to give credits. This is an easy way of using content without creating it yourself, although don’t forget rule number 1: it still needs to match with your theme and be consistent with your feed.

When you upload your own content it’s useful to tag other relevant profiles, for example if you are a café based in London, you can tag popular London pages so that you get a chance to be featured. But also, when people are looking at their tagged photos, they can see yours too, thus reaching out to new audiences.

Planning your social media marketing strategy is an important element of your business’ online success. At ClickDo we can offer our support with this as we’re social media experts. If you have any further questions about planning your strategy for your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with esmiralda@clickdo.co.uk .