5 Tips for a Winning Small Business Social Media Presence
As a small business owner, you understand the value of a strong marketing strategy, but social media marketing can be so complex sometimes. This relatively new type of marketing requires a different set of skills and an understanding of the ways social media can promote your business and your brand to the population.
So here are five tips to gain a winning social media presence and expose great opportunities for new customers for your business.
1. APPEAL TO YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
As obvious as it seems, you need to constantly reassess who your target audience is so that you can craft your advertising messages in a way that resonates with them. Research the demographics of your target audience and find out whether your audience responds better to written content, imagery or videos. Do you speak to them from a level of authority, or would they be more engaged with colloquial language? Actively engaging them with content that they like and find interesting and in a manner they understand, will help to build a genuine online presence.
2. YOU NEED A STRATEGY
Engaging in a social media campaign with no clear strategy will waste your time and money. So be very clear about your objectives before you start. These objectives are to engage your target audience and to build a positive relationship with them.
To do this, you need to identify the channels that your target audience frequents and create posts that will actively engage them. You should have a set posting schedule, for example posting 3 times a week and rotating a business topic, a humorous topic and an informative topic. This shows that you are not all about selling your business, but you are concerned about building relationships and educating your audience.
3. SELECT THE RIGHT CHANNELS
Make sure that you focus on the channels that your target audience frequents. The most common platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube, but that doesn’t mean that your potential customers use one or all of these channels.
If sell products that a highly visual, then make sure your images are “pinned” on a business Pinterest account. Some social media platforms are more appropriate for certain types of businesses, but whatever you decide, be sure to do your research and focus on the channels that are popular within your target audience.
4. ADOPT A BUSINESS PERSONA
This is not your personal social media network and you should not treat it as such. It’s a great idea to come up with a persona that is thought to be writing the posts in order to keep a consistent tone. Also ensure that staff members who may post on the social media accounts have this persona in mind. You must keep your posts professional, as they reflect your business and your brand. Also, ensure that any artwork, themes and imagery reflect your business, rather than your personal tastes, so have well written content, with correct grammar and spelling.
5. INVEST TO RECEIVE
Not many things are free in the world of business and social media marketing requires an investment in your time and money. You must invest to benefit your business, so running competitions via social media could be a great idea depending on your target audience.
Depending on what you are posting, only between 5-10% of Facebook posts get seen by your followers organically. Therefore, it’s often worthwhile to pay to boost the posts that you really want your audience to see. A benefit of this is that you can specify exactly who sees your post, based on city, age, interests and more! So consider this promotion as a business expense and weigh up if it would be valuable for your business.
With these 5 tips you can build and maintain an effective social media presence for your brand. If you’d like to investigate the power of a multi-channel digital strategy for your business or simply lack resources to write content or design quality artwork, call MeMedia on 07 5518 8732 or complete our online enquiry form.
