Small businesses may not have as much funding or history as large conglomerations, but they can still level the social media playing field by managing their brand, being creative, targeting the right audiences and staying on track. Expand your online reach and build your followers with these social media tips for small businesses.
Stay Consistent
Consistency is vital in social media. Your messages should align with your business goals, mission and vision. Your messages should also complement each other, not contradict. For example, if your business is taking a stance on a current issue, stick to that stance.
Maintaining consistent quality is also important for your social media profiles. Make sure your posts are all grammatically correct with no spelling errors. Keep your images consistently high-quality and make sure the thought process put into your posts are well-reasoned. It would look strange to your audiences if one day your posts are top-quality and the next they are riddled with bad grammar and poor judgement.
Define Target Audiences
Before you begin marketing, make sure you know whom you’re marketing to. Define your target audiences and create profiles in order to best serve them. These profiles should include which social media sites your audience spends the most time on, their likes, dislikes, motivations and behaviors. All this information will go into refining your messages to be more likable, memorable and relevant.
One way to refine your audience is to target local. Small businesses are extremely relatable on a local scale because your audience understands that you are focused on the local community. Try targeting local audiences to build up your social media following before expanding to large communities. For example, you can use social media to offer specials for individuals living in a certain zip code, or host a local community event.
Be Creative
Creativity will go a long way on social media. Creativity will help messages and campaigns stick in users’ minds and keeps your brand remarkable and memorable. Aim for extraordinary audiences. No one wants to be ordinary, so if you aim your campaign at ordinary people, you may end up connecting with nobody.
Utilize humor, creative messages, and extraordinary ideas to keep your social media pages fresh with interesting content that will keep your followers coming back for more and attract new audiences.
Send Authentic Messages
Social media users can pick up on posts that are just trying to sell a product or brand. In order to avoid being labeled as just another brand, send out authentic messages that reflect your brand instead of describing it. For example, if you sell running shoes, don’t post a picture of the shoes with a caption like “our new line features two different colors and styles.” Instead, post a picture of the shoes in action, with someone running up a mountain trail and the caption “taking you to new places with two new colors and styles.”
Sending authentic messages will help establish your brand and brand personality to your followers, without coming off as too sales-oriented.
Post Regularly
Different social media websites have different recommended posting times and frequencies, but all of them should be regularly active to keep the attention of your current followers and gain new ones.
According to a post on Quicksprout, the best times to post on Facebook are 1 and 3 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. On Twitter, best days to post are weekends and Wednesdays at 12 p.m. or 5 to 6 p.m. and on LinkedIn the best days are Tuesday to Thursday are 7 to 8 a.m. or 5 to 6 p.m.
In addition to keeping your social media profiles active, make sure you don’t share too much on any of them. In platforms such as Twitter, it isn’t uncommon to post 5 or 6 times a day, but on Facebook and LinkedIn try to limit your posts to two a day.
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About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
